


Out of the Spider's Web

by KaenOkami



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Backstory, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Drowning, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, F/M, Gen, Gorgon Family Bullshit, Medical Experimentation, Resbang 2018, Torture, Violence, seriously not one single healthy relationship for miles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 02:39:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 35,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17194940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaenOkami/pseuds/KaenOkami
Summary: Arachne Gorgon gets to work quickly after her parents’ murder. With the aid of her hypnosis magic, the cult of Arachnophobia builds quickly, and sets about making its power known and setting Arachne’s experiments in weapon creation into motion. Medusa and Shaula are indoctrinated into this world as well, and Arachne seeks to turn them into the perfect soldiers and devotees to vanguard her forces. But Medusa is prideful and Shaula is fearful, and deep down neither of them wish to be pawns in their sister’s game. However, escaping Arachne’s web may be an impossible task…





	1. Chapter One

Contrary to what would, decades and centuries in the future, become popular belief, Arachne Gorgon did not murder her own parents.

As a matter of fact, the day of their deaths would be one that she would rather erase every trace of from her memory. Even at that young age -- young by witch standards, at any rate -- she thought herself above falling prey to such petty things as despair and grief, and did not enjoy the reminder that she was nowhere near so infallible as all that.

At that stage in her life, she could not lie so convincingly that she could even fool herself. 

As a mere adolescent, all she could do was hold in her tears, and hold her even younger sisters tight, and force the pain deep into the recesses of her heart for as long as their eyes were still on her. Nero Zaphir had been free with those emotions, had unabashedly shed tears of rage and grief in front of his daughters and foster son, that much was true. But witches’ fathers were, traditionally, largely unimportant to their development. Certainly not the parent that they should be aspiring to emulate. Minerva Gorgon, even in her moments of soft and sweet affection, had never once let down her iron mask of austerity, never outwardly betrayed what lay roiling beneath. 

Always haughty, always above...But that didn’t matter anymore, now.

Home was no longer safe for them now, even leaving aside the fire and blood that now stained the mountain side. The place itself would, technically, function as a defensible stronghold -- only those of Gorgon blood or with Minerva’s magic seal on them could safely access it -- but she wasn’t strong enough to actually defend it, even with the help of a familiar. Not from rival witches seeking to loot Minerva’s home and steal her secrets, and certainly not from the werewolf pack that still roamed around it, baying for the blood of the half-breed children.

Half-breed. The phrase put a bitter taste on Arachne’s tongue. It seems as if no one who has ever flung that word at them -- the children for being born and their mother for bearing them -- legitimately understood what it was supposed to mean. They were nothing like true half-breeds, those sterile mistakes born without a witch’s power, no matter how strong their mother’s blood. The three of them, on the other hand...They were every inch the heirs to their ancient family line, she reminded herself firmly. 

She lifted her hand and felt the magic tingling just under her skin. Warm pins and needles, but she thought that she could almost reach it: the legendary black fire, raging and powerful, that her mother alone among the world’s witches had harnessed and mastered. 

Ostensibly, none of her children had inherited the gift, and that was natural enough not to be a demerit against any of them. Witches’ daughters were expected to match the strength of their mothers’ souls, but not necessarily replicate their specific talents or bond with their specific familiar. It was the mother’s role -- the dynamic one in witch families -- to analyze and nurture her offspring’s unique talents, to bring each new witch she had brought into the world to her very fullest potential. 

But...It wasn’t unheard of. She had tried before, hoping to unlock something deep in her blood, knowing that the chance was slim but it was there that someday she --

Bang. 

“Ah!” 

Arachne recoiled, reflexively and rapidly shaking her hand to wave the sudden burst of pain away. She grimaced; she hadn’t been thinking straight, her magic wasn’t anywhere near as combat-oriented as Minerva’s, or even Nero’s. Trying to force her body to do something it simply wasn’t meant to do, her mother had often had to chastise her, was the habit of a fool. 

Never mind anyway. That wasn’t what she needed to focus on right now. 

This wasn’t the only safe house that Nero had taken the time to dig out for his family — about the most useful thing the wolf had ever done, with that fire and those huge paws — nor was it the only one that she had been brought to by her parents before, so that she would know where to bring her little sisters should this exact disaster befall them. But it was the nearest one, and the only one that she had been able to reach with the two of them in tow before exhaustion claimed her.

Another deep sigh forced its way up from her chest. Such reflexes were supposed to be to relieve pain and stress, it had said in one of her mother’s books. But it hadn’t gotten any better, in the long, numb hours since they had holed up in the hideout. This long-abandoned house deep in the forest, just the sort of place that humans were convinced that witches were supposed to live, their children whispering to each other about the monstrous things that would devour them if they wandered too far away. Right now, she was relying on the traps and magical veils that her mother had set around the place to protect them all: she is strong, but she didn’t think she would be able to muster up the power or the energy to fight off even a human child. It was a shameful and pathetic admission, that she could only bear to make to herself, but it was a true one.

It’s just...She couldn’t...Just this morning she had been arguing with her mother over the breakfast table about...Oh, she didn’t even remember what it had been about, now! And in mere hours, here she was. Holed up in this cold, empty house, tired and sore and unable to calm her frantic heartbeat. Yet she still cannot make herself try and go to sleep.

She took one last peek out the thin but tall front window, past the filmy gray curtains. It is difficult to make out the trees, through the darkness and the thick, grime-filled glass; this was an older safe house and not one that was very well maintained. They would move, she had already decided, just as soon as she thought it safe to do so. As of right now, they were as close to safe as they were going to get. The shadows out in the forest surrounding them were wide and deep, but they were still. 

Nor was there any sound to be concerned about, through the thin walls: the yells of anger, the clashing of lance and claws, the hiss and roar of flames, they were all only echoing in her own head. She wished that they would stop, or at least go duller in her memory, because there was not enough out her to distract her from them. Here, there were only night birds (though not the bird she wanted to hear), insects, and her own soft breathing.

Yes, she could leave her post for a moment, she decided, letting the curtains fall back and rising from the thin-cushioned window seat. Hard, short, and dusty as it was, she was so drained right now that it seemed like the perfect place to finally lie down and sleep it all away for a little while. But there were more important things to attend to at the moment, she reminded herself as she went. 

Even in her soft, flat shoes, Arachne thought she could hear her steps echo on the wood floor on her way up the stairs and down the nearest corridor. She could certainly hear them creaking like dying men, and it was lucky that the thin boards didn’t give way at all. She winced slightly when one let out a particularly loud noise, and winced harder at the shrill of her key in the lock and the screech of the unoiled hinges when she opened the door at the end of the hall. 

However, it didn’t seem to matter. The bedroom’s two small occupants remained just as soundly asleep as they had been before, when their older sister stepped into the room. Another heavy, chest-deep sigh escaped her as she looked from one girl to the other, each laid out on top of the beds on either side of the room. Though, at the same time, she could not help but allow herself a tiny, half-hearted smile. Their parents had been beyond her ability to help, a fact that she hoped would not remain quite this raw and bleeding in her heart for long. But she had done what she was supposed to do at times like this, after all. Her little sisters, at least, she had been able to save from the many jaws of death that had claimed Minerva and Nero. 

Carefully, so as not to disturb either child, she walked over to Shaula’s bed first and sat down beside her. She ran her fingers over the silver bird on the end of the girl’s necklace, and then took her sister’s two long braids in her hands and started gently to undo them, the way their mother had always done before putting her youngest to sleep. Minerva (or Nero, if one of his daughters simply couldn’t wait her turn) would brush their hair, as well, but she decided that they could skip that part, just for tonight. Or perhaps for a few nights, until it wouldn’t bring up any painful memories. Rushing things was something else Minerva had always considered foolish, Arachne remembered. All at once, it seemed like an insurmountable task before her, to remember everything her parents had spent so many years trying to impart on their eldest. 

She could barely remember what she had said, if anything, and done with Shaula in their escape here. Realizing what was about to happen in front of them, she had done her best to shield the nine-year-old’s eyes, to keep the slaughter of their parents and the destruction of their home from imprinting itself on them. But from the way Shaula had wailed, sobbed, and struggled to get out of her older sister’s arms as they’d fled, she thinks she was a few all-important seconds too late for that. In the thin streams of moonlight flowing in from the room’s one small window, she can still see the puffiness around the girl’s eyes, and the remaining tear stains that are streaking down her cheeks. She really had tried to think of the right things to do and say, to quiet and still the tiny bundle of hysteria in her arms, but it hadn’t done any good. Shaula had wanted nothing to do with her, and had wound up crying herself to a fitful sleep. She was happy to see the girl lying there at least somewhat more relaxed than before; it relieved the tension in her shoulders by just a tiny bit.

Who would have thought, she wondered idly, tucking a loose lock of the girl’s hair behind her ear, that after all the grief you two have given me, I would feel so lucky to see you alive and stuck with me?

Soon enough, maybe both of them would be clinging to her, instead of fighting with her. She remembers the way Minerva’s ever-present black cloak had wrapped around them all, no matter how old they got, and rested heavy and protective as an embrace over their shoulders. It takes particular mental effort to stop herself from suddenly, wildly wishing for it back, and consider instead that now the job of eliciting that feeling in her sisters’ hearts would be falling to her. So many things were, now...But it would not do to be overwhelmed by them now. 

One more, then, she thought as she laid Shaula’s head back down on the lump of pillow under the quilt. She got up and went over to sit on the other bed, as she had several times before since they had gotten here, to check on its occupant. Medusa...For the past twelve years, she had been trying to figure out how her younger sister’s mind worked. The two of them had butted heads more than they had spoken civilly, she found herself disappointed to remember. The girl’s willful nature had been nothing but infuriating as they had both grown up, and Arachne had been unused to having a younger sibling that refused to listen to anything she was trying to say. She had never been certain how to control her without one of their parents there to call on, or without invoking Minerva’s name if they weren’t nearby. 

So she would be worried about handling the girl now...Were it not for the part of today that still startled and intrigued her all at once. Medusa had always been, in the words of their mother, a concerning child. 

(The words of the other witch-children who refused to play with them if their middle sister was around, she recalled with some vague amusement, cut far closer to the point.) 

Arachne had never seen a look of disgust or horror on her face, even at the most stomach-turning things. Not that Minerva and Nero had ever gone out of their way to put such sights before their children’s new and innocent eyes, she thought wryly. But in a world that had never been kind to them and never would be, no matter how much they simply wanted to be left be, sometimes it was simply inevitable. Witch hunters, Immortals, dogs of Shinigami, even other witches who would see both half-breed males and the witch who loved them perish...Obviously they had to die. And they didn’t get to pick and choose when and where this happened. 

She remembers shock and horror in her own heart, and shrieks of fear from Shaula, both quickly calmed by whichever parent was near. But when she had looked at Medusa, making sure that she herself wasn’t panicking more than her younger sister right in front of her, there had been none of that. There was never anything at all. Only blank eyes and an expression of vague curiosity, at the sight of blood and murder; if she looked hard enough she could almost see the gears in the girl’s head turning as she tried to put together the pieces of what she was looking at. 

Today, she had been able to try and shield one sister from the horror below them, but not the other. And amid her own horror, she had seen the exact same reaction as always from Medusa. Going so unnaturally still, staring, unblinking, as if it were just a crushed insect below her instead of her mother’s body in pieces, her father blowing himself to bits...until her eyes had suddenly rolled back in her head and her small body pitched forward. She’d been unconscious before she hit the ground, and there was a dark bruise blooming on her hairline where she’d struck the stone, a second before Arachne had thrown her over her shoulder and bolted from the mountain. 

Arachne stroked the sleeping girl’s face with the backs of her fingers. She’d been passed out cold for hours, but her breathing and heart rate sounded normal, now. Fainting from fear and stress, as she understood it, did not necessarily indicate further internal problems, though that whack on the head did worry her. If morning came and she did not wake, then her siblings would turn to the aid of what medical magic she had at her disposal. But until that point -- which she doubted anyway would come -- she will simply keep the girl comfortable, and wait. 

“You really managed to give me quite a scare,” she whispered. Admissions like these she would never make normally, but now that both girls were asleep...Well. They would never have to know. “For a minute there, I thought you’d up and died from fright, until I heard your heart still beating. Don’t think I’ll let you do that to me, anymore. You aren’t getting away from me that easily.”

Shaula had always been easy to handle, so eager was she to catch up with and earn the approval of her much older sisters. Medusa would surely be interested in satisfying no one but herself, now that Minerva was gone and to strive for her approval was pointless. The girl would need to find a new thing to ground her against her impulses, now...Arachne knew that that placing herself in that role would be the expected course of action, taking on her mother’s mantle and all. However, the thought of it left her feeling...empty, somehow. Like there was a piece of a puzzle she was missing.

Before she could devote much thought to figuring it out, though, she caught the now-painfully familiar sound of a raven’s kaaaa-awk just outside the bedroom walls. Then the sound of small flapping wings...

She didn’t have to wait too long before there came the sound of a light landing behind her. Soft-soled footsteps. And finally, a whispered voice.

“Onee-sama.” 

She turned her head. “Karasu.”

He wasn’t standing, as she had thought: her mother’s familiar was kneeling, looking at her with an uncharacteristically grave expression through the black waves of hair falling over his dark eyes. “I flew over the entire area. Three times. No one is around. I can keep watch as long as you need me to, but I’m fairly sure we’re safe here for the night.”

Arachne regarded the other teenager for a moment before she answered. Her very earliest memory was of her mother coming home, gently leading by the hand a pale, too-thin, wide-eyed boy who mumbled everything he said. He had clung tightly to her that day, and every other day after that, when he wasn’t being led around by his new sister. A true half-breed, wielding borrowed powers instead of innate ones. Karasu might be the eldest (or perhaps not, they weren’t quite sure of when the boy had been born) of the four of them, but she was Minerva’s firstborn. And yet it was he, the weaker one, who had received her greatest gift, had inherited her power...

She gave her head a small shake: how petty, to think that way, to resent her poor loyal brother. The way she should be thinking about it, was that she had now inherited him. Familiars did not often pass down family lines -- the bond was weaker if not individually chosen and forged by both witch and familiar themselves -- but it was not unheard of. 

Karasu blinked in confusion, clearly thinking she was shaking her head at him. So she spoke to clarify: “Sleep, Karasu, you have earned it. I’ll watch over you all. When we’re all rested and ready in the morning, we’ll start moving on. I trust that you can find us food?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Good.”

“Where are we to go? Father didn’t have any connections, but...Mother’s friends?”

Arachne considered. There were few people in the world that the aloof Minerva Gorgon had considered friends; before she’d met her husband, she had largely lived life alone, and he had continued to be her primary company outside of her children up until...Well. Today. But, there were a few. As Arachne had observed throughout her life, one needed two things to maintain a comfortable status in witch society: stable alliances to make up for what one lacked, and avoidance of making enemies that would take away what one had in the first place. Of course, if one had sufficient power, then it would eliminate the need for either of those things, which were so difficult to come by and maintain in the first place. 

“No,” she decided. “No...At least not yet. We don’t know for sure that we can trust them. We wouldn’t...We can’t properly heal and grow strong again if we’re constantly worrying about the intentions of whoever’s care we’re in, and what sort of strings their kindness will have attached.”

Karasu’s mouth pressed into a flat, uncertain line. But it was not his place to argue with the head of the family. “You have another plan?”

“I do. At the very least, I have the beginnings of one.” 

She could see the map of safe houses in her head, every line and coordinate memorized from how many times her mother had shown it to them. As of now, your sisters are too young to fend for themselves, Minerva had said. With any luck, your father and I will be there to get all of you to adulthood, but in the event that we aren’t, you and your brother will be responsible for them. The nearest safe house was...Yes. Yes, that one would do just perfectly, and it was not at all a long journey away from this one. So long as they kept to the route their mother had drawn them, staying away from human settlements, and had the good luck to avoid roving witch hunters, dogs of Shinigami, and other such threats to young witches, they would be there by early afternoon and in all likelihood settled in by nightfall. 

Slowly the plans and the lessons from her mother came back to her, as did all the conclusions she had drawn from them, most of them somewhat separate from Minerva’s intended teachings. She had been panicking before, yes, she recognized. And shock was still dominating her system, as if she had been grabbed by the collar of her dress and flung off of a cliff. Despite knowing, logically, that they would be all right, that there was a safety net half woven already for them, that feeling still would take time to wear off. But it would be all right, and she would make sure of it. 

She had had plans of her own in place, did she not? Perhaps some a little shakily, but still. She had spent the times before and after the witch masses making friends of her own, instead of clinging to her mother’s skirts like her siblings. Friendships where she was the one in control. Where the three of them studied combat, she had been going through all the books in the basement and experimenting with her own magical specialties (Minerva had been curious, but willing to lend her private space to her daughter for such purposes; she is near enough to an adult, after all). Hypnosis and coercion magic were tricky arts, but nothing she couldn’t handle, and ones she was surely soon to master. 

“Onee-sama?” Karasu was still kneeling. “I...If you want to sleep, I’ll -- ”

“No,” Arachne said again, more decisively this time. She got up from Medusa’s bed, pulled her brother to his feet, and guided him firmly to the third free bed to emphasize the point. “I will watch over you three for the night. I’ll sleep when you all are safe in our new home. For now, get your rest.”

Karasu nodded, but still insisted, “Wake me at dawn,” as he allowed himself to be laid down on the dusty quilt.

He fell asleep quickly, still in his clothes: a loose shirt, pants, and cloak in the same blacks and dark violets that their mother had liked to wear. She decided that they suited him better; it’s easier to believe that this boy, quiet and dark and unassuming, could melt into the shadows simply by force of will. The way their mother’s golden hair and eyes had shone even brighter against the darkness she draped herself in had tended to soften the effect somewhat, even once you factored in the sharpness of that glare. If anyone but her had had to inherit their mother’s power...She supposed he wasn’t such a bad choice. He would be useful, at any rate.

The room was quiet around them, with the kind of heavy and haunting silence that only an old and empty house could stir up. The lurid images of her parents’ destruction still replayed in seconds-long bursts at the back of her mind, though she was able to somewhat block out their sounds. She was running solely on residual shock and adrenaline, that still had the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. But what Arachne had told her brother was true: it would last her the night, and she would keep her siblings safe here until the first rays of dawn broke through the curtained window. 

~0~

It was barely an hour after those pale rays made their way into the room that the children first started to stir. Shaula, the fitful little thing, had woken squirming and whimpering like a newborn kitten. Karasu, anticipating another round of crying, had picked her up and taken her out of the room, both to soothe her and to find her something to eat. 

Arachne was glad of it: it meant she was able to stay here with Medusa, who had not woken once all night. Arachne had regularly checked her breathing, her heart, the temperature of her forehead all last night, and that all still seemed fine. Even so, she decided that she would give it perhaps fifteen more minutes and then go find Karasu; he knew more about the healing capabilities of their mother’s shadow magic than she did, she thought with some trace of bitterness. 

But as it happened, that would not be necessary. A couple minutes more, and the girl was stirring under her hand. She sat at her little sister’s side and brushes her short, soft bangs out of her face, as her wide golden eyes started to flutter open. Drowsily, Medusa managed to look up and focus on Arachne’s face, and Arachne realized that this was the closest she would ever come again to looking into her mother’s eyes. She wasn’t sure how that thought makes her feel...But now was not the time to be deciding such things.

“Awake at last,” she cooed, trying for the soft tone their mother had used, when one of them was hurt. “Are you all right?”

Medusa’s lips parted for a moment as if to answer, and then she froze. Arachne could practically see the girl’s mind working as she came back to reality and remembered all the details of what happened. Her round little face twitched as it all fully hit her. 

“M-Mother and Father?” she whimpered. 

A question. Arachne felt something twist in her chest. “You didn’t dream it, if that’s what you were hoping.”

“Nee-san...” Her voice was a barely audible plea, halfway to a sob. “What...What are we going to do now?” 

She smiled. She had an answer to that, nascent and shaky as it was. “Don’t worry. I’ve had something in mind for myself for a long time, and I’ll have no trouble taking you into it as well. I’ll take care of all of you from now on.”

Normally, a statement of her older sister’s ambitions would elicit only a mocking laugh from Medusa. But now, the girl’s eyes widened in pure relief. 

“You will? Really?”

“Of course I will.”

Arachne decided to test her limits for a moment. She leaned down and gave her sister a gentle kiss on the temple, and instead of hissing in disgust and squirming away, Medusa laid still and let her, emitting only a small noise of surprise. She still seemed to be in shock, but the way she reached up to take hold of her older sister’s wrist — to keep her where she was? oh, it was too adorable, Arachne thought she could get used to this — seemed to be a good sign. 

“Now, do you think you can get up off this bed and come with me? We’re going to go say good morning to Karasu and Shaula, and then we’re going to get moving again.”

Medusa blinked. “Where? We can’t go back home. It’s burned.”

“We’re going to have a new home soon. One that will never be destroyed, I promise you. You and Shaula and Karasu will be safe there forever.”

Medusa kept staring, her still-stunned brain trying to process this information. Rather than waiting for her to perk up fully, Arachne figured that it would be faster to cut out the middleman and scoop the girl up to take her out to meet up with their siblings. This too Medusa allowed rather than resisted, even resting her head on her sister’s shoulder. Arachne tried not to show her delight too obviously. 

She recognized the posture as simply a more -- well, she was loath to say lifeless, that sounded far too negative -- a more exhausted version of the posture she would take whenever their mother would take her middle child into her arms, in her lap, allowing her to do as she wished with her. Towards Minerva, there were never any complaints or resistance, only attentive respect. 

She wouldn’t do such a thing even for Nero: every time he tried to hug her or pick her up, she would effortlessly wriggle out of his arms, laughing, treating their colossal beast of a father like he was nothing more than a tree to climb around on. (If she was around, Shaula would try to copy her big sister and join in.) Nero had always seemed to enjoy the game no matter how rough his younger daughter was with him — perhaps his foolishness and levity came with the wolf’s blood — but Arachne had never understood that. Surely that wasn’t how you were meant to treat a parent worthy of respect.

But that didn’t matter, she reminded herself as she carried the limp, quiet girl out of the room, down the empty halls and stairs. Now, she was the one in her mother’s place. She would be the one to watch over her younger siblings, to hold them as they clung to her. And from now on, all the awe and admiration they had held for Minerva would belong to her.

It was only what she would be owed as a mother, after all.


	2. Chapter Two

Giriko did not consider himself a complex person. He had lived through a solitary and boring childhood, needing only his machines for company, and grown into a simple man with simple desires. Heavy food. Strong booze. The flesh of a woman. Engines and mechanical bits to tinker with. The act of living in general did not please or excite him, but he could be content, he had told himself long ago, if he just had these things to tide him through the long tedium. Nobody else in his life had ever suggested to him that there might possibly be more to this whole existing thing -- they were quite content themselves to give him as wide a berth as they could, in fact -- and so he hadn’t ever considered that possibility himself.

Arachne Gorgon, on the other hand, seemed to see a little bit more in him than even he saw in himself.

“You have a natural curiosity, Giriko,” she had said, taking his chin in her hands. Her long black nails had scratched gently at his neck, and even if he had wanted to tear his gaze away from hers, he didn’t think he would have been able to. “You’re intelligent. Innovative, even. I don’t see such things in a human very often.”

He didn’t see what was so great about his stuff. So he had some interesting blueprints, big deal. They were just a way to pass the time. But Arachne seemed to like them, and was willing to invite him to her fortress in the mountains up north to join in on their burgeoning research team, and give him the chance to mix his engineering skills with some actual magic, borrowed as it might be. The additional invitations to her bed, too, were incredibly welcome. The idea of a woman pinning him to his bed, rather than the other way around, had been a new and startling one to him, but not one he necessarily disliked. In fact, it was one he just might be able to get used to real fast, he had thought with a smirk. 

Now, if only these goddamned kids weren’t part of the package deal. 

Karasu wasn’t that bad, but he was near enough to adulthood to be tolerable, like Arachne. The little girls, on the other hand...Giriko felt like they couldn’t get a damn moment’s peace from them, in his opinion. Arachne doted on them so, to the point that he’d initially mistaken them for her daughters and nearly backed out of the whole arrangement right then and there, but he couldn’t see why. 

Shaula was a whiny little thing, scared of her own shadow and seemingly determined to live out her life clinging to or trotting at the heels of whichever older sibling was closest and most convenient. He didn’t want to make Arachne angry by swatting the runt, but he would have to find a way of getting it through her soft head that he was not an option for any of those things. She wasn’t more annoying than a typical kid her age, but then again, she wasn’t any less annoying, either. 

Medusa...Medusa was another story entirely. It was like there was a serpent in the room instead of a little girl. Considering what her familiar was, Giriko supposed it shouldn’t have been all that surprising a feeling. More than once, he had noticed the girl crouched out in the dry grass sometimes, entirely calm as she let a snake slither into her hand and around her arm, letting it explore her skin as it pleased until Arachne saw and ordered her to throw the vermin away and return to her side. Medusa never looked particularly enthused about this, but let the snake slide back down her and off the way it had come before she left. 

(Giriko had also seen her use birds and rodents as target practice in trying to summon those weird arrow things before being told by her brother to knock that off too, so he guessed that whatever she was doing with those snakes was as close as the girl came to being gentle.)

And she would stare all the time, too. She rarely talked out loud, instead preferring to mutter into her older siblings’ ears, walked soundlessly on perpetually bare feet, and had eyes wider, emptier, and colder than any snake he’d ever seen. He saw her blink even more rarely than he heard her speak, as she sat off to the side or in a shadowed corner of a room and intently watch whatever the room’s other occupants were doing. And of late, she seemed to have taken an interest in her older sister’s newest acquisition; he would look up after a long period of complete focus on whatever machine he was putting together or blueprint he was drawing up, and there she’d be. Out of arm’s reach, as still as a decoration, and watching. He didn’t think he’d ever seen the girl blink.

“What?” he would try growling at her. “What do you want, kid?”

But she would never respond. She would keep staring him down, which was a remarkable feat considering how damn tiny she was especially compared to him. If she were any other brat, he would have chased her out the very first time, but she was Arachne’s brat, so he grudgingly let her stay. She was good about not touching anything, at least; it appeared someone had taught her to behave. So he simply learned to tune her out, and concluded that he was simply serving as another form of entertainment to her, no different than the rats in the grass, or Shaula. He guessed he could live with that and ignore her, so long as she continued to treat him as a distant curiosity.

Yeah. Like his luck could last so long without running out.

People were always scrounging around his workshops, seeking to leech off his smarts and take his stuff to pass off as their own. It pissed him off, but he could deal with it: the only thing he was better at than making things was breaking them. And the other humans had learned that if someone was foolish enough to sneak into the property of Giriko Nokogiri, they wouldn’t come back out. No one made a big deal out of it. No one wanted to be next. And no one ever succeeded, anyway.

Until they did. 

He caught them, as always, but caught them too late: woken by the crash of glass as they busted through the basement window, and just barely catching a glimpse of the tails of their long winter coats flashing in the moonlight as they disappeared into the adjacent forest. Giriko had roared with rage, not caring who else was startled out of bed, grabbed the nearest bladed thing off his workbench, and barreled after the thieves like a mad bull.

He had made it quite a distance in, following the tracks their boots left in the mud and dewy grass, before finally catching a flash of gold out of the corner of his eye, and realizing he was not alone.

“Ehhh?!” 

He turned his head fully and saw a little dark blur running alongside him, keeping pace without breaking a sweat. If not for the gold hair poking out of her hood and flying back, he might not have noticed her there; her eyes were forward, ignoring him completely. Somehow, his rage managed to flare even higher in his chest, contorting his face.

“Medusa, you little shit! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She still wasn’t looking at him. From what he could see of her face, she looked more bored than anything else. “I want to come too.”

“What?! No! Go back home!”

The girl kept running, still ignoring him. Not even flicking those cold eyes in his direction.

“Go back to your sister! Go on, shoo!” He wouldn’t actually hit the kid -- Arachne would knock his head off -- but he didn’t expect her to realize that he was only bluffing. He reached out with his non-saw-holding hand and swatted at her head, but she did not even break stride. Even when he then gritted his teeth and aimed a weak but legitimate cuff at her, she only shifted to the side, just enough to avoid it. “For fuck’s sake! Get!”

“I want to come too.”

“Why?!”

Medusa made no answer, just kept running. Giriko let out an exaggerated groan of irritation. “Fine. Come with me if you want. Make your sister as angry as you can. Just don’t get in my way!”

Medusa was silent. Giriko decided he would take that as a yes, and punish the brat accordingly if she disobeyed. 

The two of them kept pace like that through the woods for a few minutes, tearing through the brush and following the other blurs ahead of them, just on the edges of their vision. Giriko manages to hold them in his sight for most of the way, but when he started to lurch to one side, he felt something small but insistent thump against his shoulder.

“No!” It was the loudest sound he’d heard Medusa make yet.

“No? No what?!” Giriko snarled. He grabbed at the girl again -- fuck what Arachne said, if the damn kid touched him one more time he was going to pitch her straight back home -- but she deftly leapt out of his way, running off in a different direction.

“You’re going the wrong way. Those humans are running this way.”

“What?! How the hell do you know that? It’s this way, come on, you’re gonna get lost!”

“No,” she called at him over her shoulder. “The snakes told me. The humans are going this way. Hurry up, you’re going to lose them.”

Giriko let out another angry, guttural noise, but ran after the girl anyway. “Gonna kill that kid. Gonna kill her,” he growled through clenched teeth. Damn it...This brat’s life was not worth the loss of his work!

But it appeared no such exchange would have to go through, after all. The two of them crashed through the trees into a small glade, at the opposite end of which were a pair of workhorses whose saddlebags were being hurriedly packed up with his stuff. 

Now, Giriko had meant to yell words. But all that came up from his throat was an unintelligible bellow of rage, as he charged across the empty space, the short dewy grass being torn up into broken turf under the spiked soles of his boots. The people — three of them, men just a few years younger than he was, two next to the horses and the last already astride one — jumped badly, and spun around, the blood draining from their faces.

Yeah, you better be scared, you spineless thieving bastards, Giriko thought, gripping the handle of his tool harder in his bare hand. In the haze of his rage, it escaped his notice entirely that Medusa had disappeared into the shadows, nowhere to be seen. 

The men were pulling out their weapons. The boy on the horse had a proper sword, but a dull one that Giriko could tell would shatter if he put it through too much more. The other two pull a sickle and hatchet out from their belt loops. Farmer’s weapons, Giriko sneers. He takes a split second to glance down and check for the first time what he had ended up grabbing, by blind, furious instinct. A saw, heavy and thick-handled and long as his arm. His lips curled back into something like a self-satisfied grin. 

Perfect.

In the time it took him to take in all that information, he had not stopped his charge across the grass. Horse Boy gave the animal a sharp kick to get it moving quick, but it only managed to get maybe a gallop and a half in before it let out a shrill screaming noise and started to buck and rear. A second later, the other horse did the same: their eyes rolled back in their heads, flashing pure white in the darkness, and all those long legs buckled under them. The wide-eyed rider let out a scream of confusion as his mount fell at the same time its partner did, crashing heavily into the shadows and taking him with it. Giriko did not notice what became of him or why it was happening in the first place: Sickle Boy and Hatchet Boy were taking up too much of his attention.

“How fucking dare you, Nokogiri!” Sickle Boy had the balls to yell at him while making wide swings at his chest. “We know you have a witch shacking up with you! What makes you think you have the right to use magic to give yourself a leg up?”

“You weren’t satisfied before?!” Hatchet Boy pipes up, teeth bared in outrage.

Giriko just had to laugh, dodging and parrying all of their pathetic attempts at attacking him. No different than any other thief he had buried on his land before, then. “What’s the matter, you boys jealous? Of what part? You can’t make machines like mine and you’re burning up about it, or you just can’t get a woman like mine and the blue balls are driving you nuts?!”

Oh, wow, he just loved the way their eyes bugged out and they redoubled their efforts to cut him to pieces at that. 

“You evil bastard!”

“Don’t you mock us, murderer!”

“Witch-lover!”

Giriko let out another loud, raucous belly laugh. “That’s right, you little shits! I’m gonna let that woman love me up and down for as long as she likes, and give me as much of her magic as I need to rain absolute hell down on this shitty world! Your blood running hot, boys?! A fight to the death won’t give you half the thrills that I’m going to have if I hang around her as long as I want to!”

His heart was pumping hard, as it always would before he got to sink his blades into flesh or crack some bones under his fist or heel, and he could hear his own pulse pounding in his ears. Really, if there were any sensation on each that was capable of making him appreciate being alive, it had to be this one. His machines were one thing, but this...Gods damn. But he had spent too much time building up the tension, now. No sense in letting his heart wind down keeping these two idiots at bay. Time to hit the climax. 

Giriko lashed out with one leg to kick Hatchet Boy right between his skinny hips, catching the guy by surprise and sending him flying into Sickle Boy’s chest. A short trip, but a crushingly fast one, that ended with him throwing back his head and screeching to the moon when the tip of his friend’s sickle lodged in his spine. The sound shrilled even higher when Sickle Boy panicked and yanked it out, too hard and too fast. 

Giriko snickered. What a couple of cowards. Arachne’s magic would devastate such weak humans in seconds, but he didn’t think that they deserved so fantastic a death. No...His saw blade was more than good enough for thieves. He swung it behind his head and then back forward, and the sounds it made slashing through Hatchet Boy’s chest and Sickle Boy’s throat were so damn beautiful. 

To the bastards’ collective credit, they both managed to stay on their feet for a few seconds, clutching at their wounds and choking on their own bubbling blood. With one swift swing of his long leg, he knocked them both to the ground, and heard quite a few ribs cracking in half as he did. He wished he had even more blades in his legs instead of skin, so he could rip them apart properly. Arachne had mentioned an interest in weapons, he remembered idly as he lunged forward and started kicking and stomping on the thieves’ faces to finish the job. It was the same with these little shits as it was with bugs, he had discovered over the years. Not enough to cut the flesh or clip off limbs: the bodies had to be crushed. 

And you had to get them all: where there was one, there was a hundred, after all. As soon as these two stopped twitching under his gore-caked boots, Giriko looked up with narrowed eyes, scanning the clearing. Had Horse Boy run off? Back to the village to get reinforcements, maybe? No, he couldn’t allow that. He started to cross the clearing to look for another trail of footprints to follow, and at the opposite end of the grass, found something even better.

Horse Boy was bone white in the face and his huge eyes were bloodshot. He was writhing like a fish out of water trying to run away, and clearly doing his best to scream his lungs out, too. But he was pretty handily prevented from doing either by the long blackish-purple arrows wrapped around his limbs, waist, and mouth. They were tight enough that the razor-sharp edges were slitting through his skin like paper, letting more blood trickle out the more he struggled. And right next to his head was crouched Medusa. The girl was flexing her fingers to keep the bindings secured, letting two dark brown shakes as thick around as Giriko’s wrist wins over and over around her upper arms, and was staring up at him with wide, unblinking eyes.

“Uh...Well. So that’s where you went,” Giriko said, intelligently.

She just kept staring. “I held this one for you. Sister says I’m not allowed to fight yet. Or kill. But I let my friends take the horses. And I held this one for you.”

Horse Boy lets out a long attempt at a scream, hearing that. The arrow around his mouth tightens. 

“You sayin’ you want to watch?”

Medusa blinks. “Mother had to do this sometimes. But she never let me watch like this, even when I asked nicely.”

“Huh. Ain’t you had an old man, too?”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Father never left enough to look at.”

“How about that...” Giriko hefted his saw again. “Well. You feel like holding him a little tighter? You can watch as close as you want.”

Medusa nodded, and obeyed. Giriko smirked as he angled the saw blade. “Hold still, you shitty thief. I gotta teach this little girl a lesson, now.”

Horse Boy screamed yet again, and tried to struggle away, but it was no good, Medusa had him too tight. Giriko rammed the blade of the saw straight into the boy’s sternum, sinking the thing in through bone, flesh, and organ until he pushed all the way into the dirt under his back. He thrashed as if thrown in a fire, until Giriko twisted the blade around, harder and harder until the boy choked on blood and finally stopped twitching under it. Giriko paused, waited...And only when Horse Boy stayed unmoving for a full minute, he counted, did he wrench the blade out from his chest and look at Medusa. 

In the admittedly short time that he had known her, he had never seen Medusa display strong emotions. Or any emotion at all, really. It was like some switch inside her was flipped off, dimming the light behind her eyes. Now, though...Those eyes were bright and sparking anew, watching the thick, dark blood gush out from the dead boy -- only a few years older than she was, he figured. Giriko wondered if pure and simple fascination counted as an emotion all its own. 

The arrows unwound and retreated back into...wherever Medusa summoned them out of, he guessed, with only the one still hovering about the boy’s bloodless face remaining. Its sharp point poked curiously at his cheek in lieu of her finger, which minutely twitched to control it, and she tilted her head like a curious bird as it lolled to the side when she pushed a little harder. With one more movement of her fingers, the arrow curved around to stick into the half-opened mouth and rest one bladed edge against its corner. With another, the blade started to press down, slowly slicing the dead boy’s cheek in half. Those eyes narrow in concentration, carefully following the straight, growing gash her blade was making in the thin flaps of flesh. 

Giriko raised an eyebrow, realizing that this was the first time he had ever seen the little girl play. It was in and of itself fascinating to watch her curiosity, like seeing a cat playing with a mouse in its claws. He figured that he was here keeping an eye on her, so it would be safe enough to stay here with her for a few more minutes watching her investigate this new and interesting toy. It was the most fun he’d had with the brat yet, after all. 

But, it was not to be. Before too long the girl’s ears twitched at the sound of a shrill kraaaaa from the night sky above, and Giriko looked up to see a raven wheeling in frantic circles over the treetops. Even without the violet eyes so bright and humanlike he could almost see the damn dilated pupils in them, he could still recognize Karasu; no regular bird ever went into such a panic.

“Go back to your sister,” he shouts up, dismissively waving his arm in the house’s vague direction. “I’m coming, I’m coming...”

With one hand, Giriko grabbed at the saddlebag that had had his invention-in-progress stuffed so roughly into it, yanking the thick ropes in two as if they were string. Medusa saw where his other hand was reached and attempted to scramble away, but too late, he scooped her up too and threw her over his shoulder as he started to stride back the way they had come. The girl thrashed around and raised her voice for the first time he had ever heard: “Aniki! Put me down! I can walk!”

Part of Giriko registered that she had called him her brother, which was certainly not something he expected, but also was not something that he particularly cared about. The rest of him was too busy just wanting the brat to quiet down. To that end, he reached over and gave her a sharp whap on the back of her thigh -- “Knock it off!” -- and with one startled yelp she went still. 

Giriko snickered, “What, never been whacked before? A scrappy little thing like you?”

Medusa was quiet for a moment, and when she next spoke, her voice was even softer than usual, so he almost didn’t hear her. “Mother says it’s not right to hurt somebody who didn’t hurt you.”

“You mean she used to say. Weird rule, huh? Bet she would never have let you play like we just did. Pretty big help, you were, tearing those bastards up.”

Silence. So he went on. Maybe this was one of those teaching moments he’d heard about growing up.

“What’s your big sister’s rule about that kind of stuff?”

“...I don’t know.”

“Well. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we? Things are different now, kid. Whatever Mommy and Daddy told you, it sure didn’t help to keep them alive, now, did it?”

That elicited an indignant squeak and wriggle from the girl, but she did not respond. He liked to think that she was ruminating on his words, all the way back to his house, where the other siblings were waiting. Karasu was held back in the doorway holding a squirming Shaula, who was too tired to move but still trying to stay awake, and only able to level a cold glare at Giriko which he returned with a smirk. Arachne, on the other hand, flew out of the house like a bat out of hell, complete with black dress flying out behind her.

No sooner had Giriko set Medusa down on her feet than Arachne was in front of her, barely inches away, and grabbing the girl’s face in her hand. Medusa yelped again and tried to recoil, but her sister’s long nails digging into her cheeks stilled her. 

“What were you doing?! When did I give you permission to leave? You could have been hurt!” 

The younger siblings all gravitated around Arachne, that much had been a given from the start. But for the first time Giriko could recall, Medusa actually looked a little afraid of her older sister. “I...I just wanted to...”

“What you want is not more important than either your safety or the peace of this family!”

Shaula flinched and hugged Karasu tighter, and the young familiar narrowed his eyes.

“Onee-sama, please calm down. I’m sure she didn’t mean to scare you. She heard trouble and wanted to help.” Karasu eyed his middle sister kindly. “Didn’t you, Medusa?”

Medusa did not dare look away from her sister to read her brother’s face. “Y-Yes,” she said quickly. “I-I was helping...”

Giriko resisted the urge to snort, knowing the girl’s defense was only half true. But though Arachne’s eyes narrowed, her grip on the girl’s face loosened for a moment. After that moment, she bit her lip and said, “Very well, then. Get back to your room and don’t come back out until tomorrow morning. We’ll discuss this then, just the two of us. Go.”

The instant Arachne released her face, Medusa bolted into the house, jostling Karasu’s legs in her rush. Karasu hurried after her to comfort her, carrying a whimpering Shaula with him. Only then did Arachne seem to remember that Giriko existed, and turn to her smirking new associate. 

“Giriko. What happened?”

“Nothing to worry yourself about, ma’am. A couple humans from the village nearby broke in and tried to make off with my work. Once we move from my place to yours, that sure won’t be a problem, will it?”

Arachne nodded, looking disdainful on his behalf. “Certainly not. What was it that they wanted?”

Giriko offered her the recovered rucksack for inspection. “The new tracking tech you asked me to work on. They had no idea what they actually were, of course. They were just jealous of your magic. Still, it pisses me off that they actually got their hands on them.”

“I see...” Arachne took one of the parts out of the bag -- if any of them were damaged, Giriko thought, he would find a way to resurrect those bastards and kill them again -- and turned it over in her hand, eying the faint purple light emitted from its center. “Given tonight’s events...I believe I may have a few suggestions to make on its final construction. While Karasu takes care of the children, what do you say I help you fix the damages done to your workspace, and you tell me what really happened tonight? Not that I don’t trust my little sister, but...”

She trailed off, evidently trusting Giriko to get her point far more. Giriko’s smirk broadened, and he nodded back. “Tell me...What are you planning to do with that little girl? Other than keep her tied up in your apron strings forever?”

Arachne narrowed her eyes again, and Giriko took a step back, putting on a sheepish smile and holding his hands up. He hoped that even a rough-looking guy like him could exude innocence. “With all respect, of course, ma’am. But that little girl seems to have some specific interests, and ain’t a parent supposed to, y’know, cultivate that shit?”

Arachne quirked one perfect eyebrow, still looking puzzled. But, it seemed to Giriko that she was relaxing from ripping-heads-off mode, and that he’d gotten her interest, too.

“Very well. Tell me...What did she really run off out there to do?”

~0~

The next morning, the sun rose on a significantly more peaceful house. The work in the basement was only half done, but that didn’t matter to Giriko; soon as they were done packing his shit up, he was out of here and never looking back. Breakfast (courtesy of Karasu, who grumbled at the coarse selection of food in Giriko’s cupboards) was a quick and quiet affair; the main event of the morning was coming between the meal and their departure.

“Now...” Arachne knelt on the hardwood floor, taking the new prototypes out, while a curious Medusa and Shaula stood straight in front of her. Giriko leaned against the wall and watched; the two of them had stayed up the rest of the night to finish the test collars. “You both have been very good traveling with me. So, as a reward, I have these pretty necklaces to give you. Come here...”

Arachne reached forward and clipped the black metal bands around both girls’ necks. The small round gems in their centers rested right on their throats, and though dark, their insides glimmered faintly with the violet light of the eldest witch’s magic. It was likely that they would end up changing the models as the years go on and new features were required, but so far all that the gems would do was track the children’s movements. Arachne kept a similar gem in the pocket of her dress, and Giriko figured that from now on, it would never leave her person...just as the collars would never come off of the girls. But there was no reason to let them know that now.

“I’ll feel safer knowing that you two are carrying part of my magic with you wherever you go,” Arachne was explaining to them, a beatific smile on her face. “If that’s always the case, then I’ll probably be calmer about it when you start to go farther away from me. So can you both promise me that you won’t ever take them off?”

“I promise!” Shaula was grinning, twisting her head around and jutting out her chest, to try and get the dark gem to catch the sunlight. 

Medusa, on the other hand, was scratching at the snug band that held her gem against her neck. “It’s cold...”

Arachne gently took the girl’s fingers away from the band, holding her much smaller hand in her own, and ignoring the way Medusa tensed up at the touch. “It’ll warm up. I know you’re cold-blooded, but you’ll get used to it, I can promise you that. So can you give me my promise?”

“...Yes, onee-sama. I do.”

Arachne’s smile broadened. “Thank you. I’m very glad. I forgive you for scaring me the way you did last night, Medusa. I’m sure it won’t happen again?”

Medusa still would not meet her eyes, but murmured, “It won’t. I’m sorry, onee-sama.”

There was a glint in Arachne’s eyes that made Giriko want to laugh. “Good girl.”


	3. Chapter 3

Though it would not be a world power just yet, it only took the next half-century for Arachnophobia to start to blossom.

To a human, four or five decades was half a life, an insurmountable chunk of time. To a witch, the very same time amounted to mere drops in the ocean. But witch adolescence lasted, on average, ninety years...So the young vanguards-in-training of the organization had changed quite a lot in that time, as much as a human would in half their teenage years. 

Despite the growth spurt, in Karasu’s eyes, Medusa and Shaula were still the little girls he had helped raise. But to his own growing chagrin, as time went by, there were more and more moments when the pair were nearly unrecognizable to him. He tried to ignore these things, and remind himself that such moments were few and far between enough that he didn’t need to worry about them. 

He himself had been largely unchanged in this time; close enough to adulthood as he had been when they first set out on this venture, all he had gained was a few inches in height and hair length, and some more sharpness to his jaw and cheekbones, though he still regretted that the last of his boyishness hadn’t quite faded away. The same fate hadn’t befallen his elder sister; Arachne had taken to adulthood as well as anyone who had craved the role of commander for so long ought to, and even without her spells to help her along, she never had any problem getting anyone to take her seriously. Karasu might have worn the blue-trimmed black robes of the highest-ranked members of Arachnophobia, and when he walked the halls of the castle as he did now, the masked lackeys all inclined their heads to him, as a powerful magic-user and their leader’s own brother. But he was still just a masterless, half-breed familiar, with borrowed powers and borrowed talent.

He had gotten lucky, being adopted by Minerva Gorgon. Between her magic and her faith in him, his inheritance was an invaluable one. But his sisters had been born powerful. And, he thought as he turned the corner towards the training hall, following the sounds of clashing blades, the laughter of one voice and the shouting of another, they were only going to get stronger.

The castle’s training ring was, in theory, meant for use by all. But in practice, it was mainly commandeered by the blades of three people. Karasu leaned in the half-open doorway, and watched all of them at their work.

Once, he had been elated if he could get his middle sister to smile or laugh, even outside of that period in which she had turned silent with grief. Now, he wondered whether Medusa even remembered what it was to feel anything like grief or remorse. The round-faced, blank-eyed little girl was nearly a ghost of the past, replaced by a lanky teenager who was all sharp angles, lean muscles, and hard-glinting gold. Beads of sweat ran down her face and back, sticking her loose front braid to her neck, and her face was reddening with exertion. But still her right arm was fully extended as she held her new Vector Blade in a confidently loose grip, and still her lips were spread in a delighted grin.

This particular taunting expression, as usual, was directed at Shaula, who met it with an equally typical glare of utmost frustration. Their relatively small age difference now meant very little, as far out of true childhood as they were, but it was still easy to tell from demeanor alone which was the elder sister and which the younger. Medusa stood straight and proud, daring her sister to challenge her again. Shaula had the general air of a cornered beast, half hunched over to protect a wounded side, hands pressed to the tender spot while her braid hovered protectively in front of her. The prehensile weapon’s coils were still short and its point too dull to do too much damage. But, it was still new, still sparking with yet more untrained magic. It would grow stronger, given the time and space to do so, as Minerva would surely have said. She had said the same of him, as a young child whose attempts at solidifying their shadows kept falling apart in his hands. 

It took him only seconds to make these observations. Before he was quite settled, Giriko once again nearly went red in the face blowing the whistle he kept around his neck for these occasions. Karasu could never pick out a specific pattern or reason for his doing it, and he suspected that Giriko just enjoyed the shrill-sounding symbol of authority. 

“All right! Medusa, focus! You’re swinging wild! Shaula, stronger, quit holding back! I see you flinch instead of block one more goddamn time, I swear -- “

Shaula winced again, trying to stop herself halfway through, and Karasu didn’t have to think. He twitched a hand, and violet-edged black fire shot like a rocket over the flat stone ring between Shaula and her trainer, making both of them jump back and yelp. (Medusa, for her part, merely raised her eyebrows and lifted her sword out of reach of the flames.)

“You’ll do what, my friend?” Karasu plastered a falsely amused smile on his face, crossing his arms over his chest. The cold flames of shadow still danced around his fingers. “I should hope you would have learned your lesson about laying hands on your students and sisters, after last time.”

Shaula’s face lit up in relief. “Nii-san!” she cried, ignoring how Medusa rolled her eyes at the enthusiasm. 

Giriko grumbled, rubbing at his wrists even though they were surely not tender anymore. He had found out the hard way that his thick hide engineer’s gloves could in no way protect him from shadow magic. “What’s it to you, bird boy? Aren’t you for patrolling?” 

“Just got back.” Karasu strode into the sparring hall like his mother had once strode into war meetings. His voice did not carry in the wide empty space like hers had, even at its softest, but he was learning, too. “Burned a stray wolf trying to sneak past the guards at the outposts, but other than that, largely uneventful.”

Strictly speaking, Karasu had no grudge against werewolves; his own father had been one, even if he hadn’t been anywhere near as close to Nero Zaphir as he had been to Minerva. But the images of his father’s enemies swarming their childhood home like a pack of rabid dogs was still burned into his mind, and he would admit some vindictive pleasure in doing for this refuge what he could not do for the first one. But, of course, that was neither here nor there.

He stepped onto the risen stone platform, placing himself directly in the middle of all three of them. Now Giriko was the tense one, even if he was trying to hide it under his irritation, while Shaula was straightening up as much as she could as he looked at her. 

“Are you all right, Shaula?”

“Y-Yes...” Shaula was clearly trying very hard not to look at Medusa, now smirking and leaning on her sword. She slowly started to lift her hand from the spot on her side. “Just a scratch, don’t worry.”

Karasu narrowed his eyes at the amount of visible blood staining the girl’s torn red dress: not enough to be truly damaging, but enough to thoroughly concern him, at least. With another wave of his hand, the same black flames enveloped the wound, this time to heal the flesh instead of burn. In seconds, the wound was closed over and only a stain was left on Shaula’s skin.

“Th-Thank you, nii-san...”

“And you...” Karasu turned his narrowed eyes to Medusa, who met them unrepentantly. It was still unsettling Karasu that she was nearly tall enough to look him straight in the face, now. “I told you before, practice matches are no place to be drawing such blood. Did you not hear me, little sister? Any of those times?”

Medusa idly twisted the sword’s hilt around under her palms, so the blade spun and the point dug a notch into the stone floor. “Must have slipped my mind, Karasu. I’m not being trained to scare off our enemies, you know. Priorities, and such.”

“Don’t think I’ll accept that kind of excuse one more time, Medusa. You’re too smart to play dumb.” Karasu was fairly certain that Medusa was incapable of being frightened by their mother’s magic, which she still only knew as a thing of healing and protection, but he allowed the black flame to swirl around him warningly anyway. “And you’re long past too old to be petty.”

That, at least, wiped the smile off of the girl’s face. “Who’s petty?” 

“Self-professed soldiers who think they can get away with bending the rules however they please. But, it’s up to you whether you fit that description or not, little sister.” 

Before Medusa could respond, Giriko made a noise of irritation in the back of his throat and spoke up again. “So are you here just to bother us, or what?” 

“Well, since you ask, I’m here on my elder sister’s behalf,” Karasu said, lifting his chin and allowing himself a supercilious grin at the mention of his relation to their leader. Giriko was intelligent, to be sure, but not irreplaceable, and Karasu would take some further vindictive pleasure in reminding him that family would undoubtedly always come before paramour in Arachne’s eyes. “You’ve gone overtime here again. Giriko, she wants you giving the golems another test run in the lab, their range needs to be increased. Medusa, she wants you in the throne room to get your assignment for the day. A minor one, but I’d still recommend washing off first.”

Giriko harrumphed and stalked out of the room without another word. Medusa flicked her hand to banish the Vector Blade from existence, and primly followed her human brother out of the training ring.

“Fine,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “You two can stay here and play. I have elder sister’s important work to do.” 

Always have to get the last word in, don’t you? Karasu thought, returning his face to a stern and serious mask. 

“Vector Plate!” 

A faint ripple of magic passed over the training floor as the wide black arrow materialized under Medusa’s feet, clad in thin, dark flats (the only shoes the girl could be convinced to wear), and lifted her into the air. Medusa smirked, bracing herself to be shot forward into the hallway and then bowl over as many minions as possible as she launched herself through the castle --

Until the forward-pointing arrow, for some reason, fired her with the force of a cannonball to the side instead. The impact knocked several cinder blocks out of the wall, and the girl’s shriek of indignance was comparable to a cat being dunked into a full bathtub. Medusa made the same sort of noise when actually confronted with cold water, now that he thought about it, it made Karasu almost snicker to remember. Shaula, having very little restraint herself, had to shove a hand into her mouth to muffle her sudden squeals of laughter. 

“Ugh!” Medusa scrambled up from the floor, eyes flaring, and shot her brother and sister a truly murderous look. 

Karasu hardly thought that that was a proportionate reaction to being laughed at a little bit, but then again, he was the eldest here, and so he should be doing his best to match the girl’s viciousness with as much support and maturity as he could. “Perhaps you should spend as much time on your magic as you do on your swordsmanship? One day you’ll be equally skilled in both. Onee-sama and I are happy to make time for you, if you like.”

He meant it one hundred percent genuinely, of course he did. Karasu had never seen the point of being dishonest to other people, especially not to his own sisters. But the way Medusa’s face twitched and her lip curled in disgust, anyone would have thought that he had spat in her face instead. Karasu’s smile fell, but before he could say anything to try and fix the situation, his sister was already storming out of the room, delivering a swift roundhouse kick to the small of Giriko’s back as they left, which unfortunately did not a single thing to quell the engineer’s ugly donkey laughter. 

There was a small beat of silence as that laughter and Medusa’s hissing disappeared down the corridor, and something half peaceful and half awkward descended on the empty hall. Fifty-fifty wasn’t too bad; Karasu supposed he could take it. Speaking of which, he thought, perhaps he still had the chance of helping at least one of his younger sisters out today. 

When he turned to Shaula, the girl seemed to be edging back towards wounded animal position, wincing back and looking unsure of herself. “Nii-san?” she asked hesitantly. “Did...Did I do something wrong? Aniki, he says I’m -- ”

“Whatever Giriko said to you, he was wrong,” Karasu snaps. It came out rather more harshly than he had intended, making Shaula flinch, so he took a quick breath to steady himself and pulled a more reassuring look onto his face. “Our dear brother’s combat strategies boil down to brute force, brute force, and yet more brute force. Medusa may be satisfied with that, but your style simply doesn’t mesh with it. That doesn’t mean that it’s weak, it only means that you need a different approach to help you hone it.”

“Oh,” said Shaula simply. After a moment of deliberation, she went on, “You told nee-chan that you would help her out if she asked you to, though I don’t think she ever would. So, in that case, would you mind...giving that time to me instead?” 

The first genuine smile of the day settled onto Karasu’s face, and the sight of it made Shaula near-instantly relax. “I wouldn’t mind that at all, little sister. Onee-sama has had me away for so long that I haven’t gotten to get a proper look at that new thing you’ve been doing with your hair. Finally earned that scorpion’s tail, have you, then?”

Shaula grinned, swiveling her new braid back out in front of her. “Is it nice? I tried soaking it in a little bit of levitation potion first, but that didn’t work at all, and onee-sama was angry at me for wasting resources. After that I started studying charms to see if those would be better, but nee-chan is in the library all the time studying too, so I had to sneak books out to read in my room without her noticing me, and practice there too, and that took months!” 

Karasu nodded along patiently to this explanation, and for what was not the first time and would certainly not be the last, thought to himself that he really ought to speak with their older sister about letting him stay home for longer stretches of time. “Sometimes it takes young witches a great effort to connect with their familiars, and the innate special abilities that come with them.”

Shaula did not look convinced. “Onee-sama told me that she could always control things. And you know how fast nee-chan learned to use her arrows, and talk to snakes.”

“Oh, well, that may be so. I was there before you, after all. But, you know...” Karasu smiled and lowered his voice as if sharing a particularly juicy secret. “Our mother once told me that it took her five hundred years to fully master shadow magic; when she was born, almost nothing was known about its capabilities. That’s a whole third of her life. You’ve barely even started out in yours, so I don’t know that there will be too much need to worry about how long it might be taking you. In fact, it might be wiser to exercise some patience: we don’t want you flinging yourself headlong into any walls, do we?”

Shaula giggled again, and for once she sounded like a carefree girl of her age ought to sound. “No, I guess not.”

“Exactly right. And now...” Karasu lifted a hand and allowed the cold black fire to gather in it once more. Slowly, this time, now that he had his sister’s full attention, so she could see how the solidifying of unplaceable magic into solid weaponry took place. In a few slow moments, he held a long naginata in his hand: a particular favorite of their mother’s, yet another proclivity he supposed he had inherited from her. “I think it’s time to show you how to properly parry and counter attacks. Would you like to begin now?”

The corner of Shaula’s mouth twitched upward, as did the end of her braid. Glimmering red magic ran from the roots of her hair to the point of that braid, where it did its best to form itself into a solid point. “You bet,” she said, louder and more confident than she ever was around their older siblings.

Karasu gripped the naginata tighter, and assumed a defensive stance. “Very good, then. Come at me!”

~0~

Fix your face. Straighten up. Gods damn it, how many things is she going to say about you when she sees you?!

After her first (well, more like the fiftieth, but she wasn’t counting and she would cut the throat of anyone she discovered was) mishap with her Vector Plate, Medusa decided that it would be best not to try it again. If Arachne hadn’t already witnessed her humiliation in the training hall, the likelihood of which she could not determine, then she absolutely would if she failed like that again in front of any of the masked lackeys that swarmed through the castle halls. Each of them had one of Arachne’s small spiders planted into the inner mesh of their masks’ eyes, so that each of them would in turn serve as more of Arachne’s eyes whenever they went. Nothing so intricate as the gems in her and her siblings’ chokers, but nevertheless effective. 

As such, the young witch had settled for stalking through the winding corridors up to her room with all the darkness, fury, and killing intent of an approaching storm, instead. There were more ways than shows of speed and power to assert her dominance over these endless, worthless humans, she supposed, but this way was just so slow and boring. She wanted to rush, she wanted to move, she wanted to...

She remembered the way it had felt to swing her Vector Blade through the air, to put every ounce of her strength into a slash or a thrust. She remembered what it was like to slice through an opponent’s flesh as easily as if it were tissue paper. Faster than that first time so long ago, with living blood to gush, for her blade to drink, so that it sent a thrill like nothing she had ever felt through every vein --

There it was again. That strange shivery warmth over her skin, the odd change in the rhythm of her heart. It wasn’t a feeling she could remember from the past, but it was once that had become more and more frequent when she drew the blood of others. Strange, true...But inconsequential, she supposed. At any rate, she wasn’t about to ask Arachne about it.

Upon reaching her room — in one of the western towers between Shaula’s and Karasu’s bedrooms, in the place of the middle child — she had rinsed and sponged herself off in a largely empty tub. She changed into a fresh set of training clothes, hoping that they would be considered acceptable; honestly, anything was preferable to the clothes that her elder sister liked to see her in. Black was a perfectly fine color, of course, and she didn’t mind an entire wardrobe of it. But still...She gave the skirts and dresses hanging almost mockingly in her closet a glare over her shoulder, as if they were to blame for all her misfortunes. Suffice it to say that she and her sisters had quite different styles, but that was the last thing she had to worry about in her life. 

She did, however, pull the elastic band from her hair (losing a few strands in the process) and then retie up her loosened braid. Her eyes had gone for a moment to the long black ribbon sticking out of a particularly thick was far more useful for marking her place in the books that took up half her desk space. But she felt more repulsion at it than such a small and unobtrusive thing had really earned. The problem was, it had been a small gift from Arachne, and gods knew it pleased her to see pieces of herself stuck onto her younger siblings.

Medusa caught herself rubbing the edges of the choker around her neck, her fingertips tracing the ridged edges of the inset of the black gem, warm with her sister’s magic. Such a terrible habit, that was turning out to be. She would have to devote more attention to breaking it. 

She turned and walked over to the unrimmed floor mirror, leaned up against a far corner of her room, as she tied the loose ends of the braid up. The expression that looked back up at her was blank as stone, with half-lidded eyes and a mouth pressed into a thin line. She wondered whether Arachne was watching her right now, through the gem and through the glass of the mirror. Even after all this time, she still had not managed to get a sense for when those knowing eyes were on her, and it put her stomach in knots to think about that lapse in her capabilities for too long. She wondered, too, what sort of expression her elder sister was wearing as she stared up at her like this; she would have preferred a much smaller mirror, but Arachne...liked to see everything of her. 

Everything of yours is mine, Medusa. That was what those eyes were saying to her, wasn’t it? Every single time they locked onto her own, golden shields to block the poison needle and thread. 

...Well, that was neither here nor there, was it? Medusa sighed; if her sister really was watching, then she was certain to chide her for wasting these few long moments admiring herself in the mirror instead of doing as she had been told to do. Time to go, then. 

She turned on her heel, the rigid rim of the black flat digging into the back of it, and walked back out of the room. Steady, now, she told herself. Calm and steady. Always. She could let the spider bite her all day, if she had to.

Let it all build up, that was the way to do it. Sooner or later she would have her release. Sooner or later, she would have her blood.

~0~

The castle in the middle of this boggy forest had been perfectly fine when Arachne had first led her younger siblings to it. A remnant of a distant ancestor in the Gorgon family line, abandoned in the centuries after her death, it had had the faint trace of old grandeur about it, but it was empty, save for clutter, dust, and the occasional nest of magical vermin that had snuck in and taken up residence in what they instinctively knew was the home of witches. It had taken a few weeks of work to make it fully livable; she and her siblings had worked very hard together. 

And then, once she had gotten a sizable enough force of workers tangled up in her web, the true renovations had begun, fixing and enchanting and extending and adding, until she was finally the proud owner of a stronghold that befitted her. She was proud of it all, of course, but what made her heart swell most of all was the throne room.

It was the perfect environment in which to hold meetings, direct her growing forces, and entertain the occasional audience, the latter of which she was doing right now. The room was not opulent or even inviting, but a cold cavernous hole as the heart of the palace, lit only by sparing rows of candles far above the heads of anyone standing on the stone floor. It did not bother Arachne, of course, perched high above them in the middle of her pristinely constructed web (the only real feature of the room, save for the times that she had the dining table dragged out from the shadows for family meals). It amused her, to see the little flies shaking below her. 

There were two of them that had been brought to her today: both witches, but not very significant ones. One bore the surname of a family that had been shunted to the side in the witch community for centuries, and the other had no surname at all. But, they both held territory that could prove beneficial to her, one for resource digging and the other for strategic importance, and though Arachne knew that she would have it either way, she preferred to have the parties of interest brought to her to discuss the matter first. She would never let it be said that Arachne Gorgon would not give her opposition the fair chance to submit peacefully, after all.

Arya, a witch clad in flowing blue robes whose elaborately styled hair made up a considerable portion of her diminutive height, clenched her tiny fists and narrowed her eyes as Arachne explained what she thought to be fair terms. Lubomira Zhroucení was attempting to look severe, in fine red silks and family heirloom jewelry, jutting her chin up and crossing her arms over her chest. But Arachne could see her pupils dilate in her pale eyes, the tightness of arms trying not to give away that she was hugging herself. 

“I am a patient woman, friends. But I dislike wasting time. So, I will ask once: are you willing to cooperate with me? Come under the protection of my people?”

There was a beat of silence in the room, which was, as far as Arya and Lubomira could see, empty save for the three of them. Oh, there were guards outside the door, of course, but she preferred privacy and intimacy with her guests. Arachne started to count down in her head from fifteen, the longest length of time that she felt inclined to let such a silence go by, but she hadn’t come halfway to zero before it was broken.

“I...I am at peace with the humans around my domain!” Arya protested. “I made a vow to protect them in exchange for that peace. To give them up, to become your slaves, would break that vow!”

Lubomira’s hands trembled, and she clutched her sleeves tighter in an unsuccessful attempt to stop it. “My family doesn’t have much, but we have held together on our land for this long. I...We do not wish to lose it.”

Arachne felt a tense sort of tug up at a top corner of her web, and resisted the urge to smirk.

Patience, my little one, patience.

She gave the two below her a placid smile -- even a light laugh might be too much, best to keep it at that -- and spoke with deliberate calmness.

“I understand your views, I was informed of them before having you brought here. I am simply asking for a yes or a no.”

Another beat of silence. Arachne had nearly completed her mental countdown before Lubomira answered first. 

“I...You will protect our assets?”

“Zhroucení!” Arya cried out, whirling on the other witch, tiny fists shaking. “You have a name! Haven’t you any pride as a witch to go with it?!”

“Hush, Arya, dear,” Arachne simpered. “I can give you a definite yes. We will protect them and utilize them well. Now can you give me your yes?”

“...I can. I will swear myself to the Gorgon family, and to you as its head.”

A soft, genuine smile came onto Arachne’s face. “Very good. You may stay here in your room for tonight, then inform your people that they’ll be moving here tomorrow while mine station in yours. And you, Arya, dear?”

Arya’s head snapped up, and there was fire in her eyes. _”No._ My protectorates are not yours to use!”

Arachne hummed, resting her chin on her hand. “You’re quite certain?”

“I am, thank you very much.”

“Mm...Such a shame, dear.”

Before the words were even out of her mouth, she felt the rush of cold air on her cheek, the thin black blur from above blowing a stray lock of her hair wildly around. Arya’s face was still twisted into a grimace, and only a small spark of surprise had time to show in her eyes before the darkly shimmering blade flew out and cleaved through her neck, fast as lightning. Arachne wondered whether Arya had even had time to realize that she was about to be killed.

Lubomira recoiled so hard her back slammed against one of the pillars lining the room, as Arya’s body collapsed to the floor, her head bouncing once before rolling to a stop a couple feet away from it. Her face had gone whiter than the corpse’s, and her bejeweled hands flew to cover her gaping mouth, that clearly wanted to scream but couldn’t produce a single sound. 

She stared in horror from Arya’s face, still frozen in its last defiant snarl, to the young teenager looking down at her handiwork, the sword of dark magic in her hand that was sucking Arya’s blood into it rather than let it drip. Arachne was certain she saw the old coward’s face turn several shades paler when Medusa looked up to meet her eyes, head tilted backward and a mocking smile spreading on her face. 

“Good choice, Zhroucení. Much less cleanup, this way.”

Lubomira blinked several times, and sputtered a few times more, before managing to speak. “You...Y-You’re just a child...”

Arachne nearly burst out laughing at the speed at which Medusa’s body went stiff with rage. Shoulders tensed, teeth bared, eyes popping, white-knuckling the hilt of her sword...What a little animal, Arachne marveled. 

“And what, exactly, are you implying?!” she hissed, brandishing the Vector Blade at Lubomira, who really did let out a strangled shriek at the sight. 

That would be quite enough of that, Arachne decided, and quickly drifted down from her web to the floor. In a moment, her side was pressed up against Medusa’s back, an arm wrapped around her chest to grab hold of her sword arm and clutch it tight. 

“That will do, my little one,” she said. Affectionate. Indulgent, even. Soft, but just loud enough for both Medusa and Lubomira to hear. If her sister were twenty or even ten years younger, she would have blushed furiously at being spoken to that way, in front of people, no less. Now, older but not quite wiser, all she did was tense her shoulders and sword arm so tight that Arachne was sure she must be hurting herself in her fight not to react. She tried not so smile too smugly, at either the younger or the older witch before her. “Settle down. You have nothing more to fight here.”

After all this time, Arachne knew the difference between Medusa genuinely relaxing and forcing herself to relax. What she did under her sister’s arm now was definitely the latter. Arachne released her -- a reward of sorts for following orders -- and turned her attention back to Lubomira for the moment. 

“You have your instructions, too, Lubomira. You are dismissed, to follow them.”

It took a few seconds for Arachne’s words to penetrate the terror still freezing Lubomira in place. Then, she choked out a frantic “Y-Yes, ma’am!” and bolted from the room. Arachne did not watch her; for one thing, she knew that there were lackeys outside the doors ready and waiting to guide her where she was meant to go. For another, it was her sister that had her full attention now whether she liked it or not. 

So as soon as the doors slammed shut, she turned to the girl next to her, who was doing a very poor job of hiding how disgruntled she was. “Now, now, dear...What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, onee-sama.”

Arachne softened her smile. “Come now, Medusa. You know you may speak your mind if you wish.”

Medusa hesitated for another moment, before banishing her sword and starting in a low voice, “I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate you giving me jobs like this to do — “

“Then what are you saying?”

The girl grit her teeth in annoyance, then took a breath and started again. “Your time is valuable, onee-sama. Why do you waste it showing off? Why not just take what you want, instead of leaving room for compromise? If...These people -- ” she spits the word as if it’s too sickly-sweet for her taste “ — are not at all deserving of your consideration. They’re obstacles, to be destroyed to make room for us. Nothing more.”

Arachne almost laughed. Her sister liked to be quick and decisive, but had little regard for long-term goals. The cold intelligence hidden beneath her hot temper was clear, and with time and care taken to nurture the former, the latter would fade away into nonexistence. Pity for Medusa that such things were not what she was kept for. 

“I will act as I choose, for the sake of my organization. I seek to show all sides of us.”

“But onee-sama, everyone already knows what we are. The end goal of seeking power is power. If they’re going to submit and give everything up to you or die anyway, and there’s nothing they can do to stop you, why does it matter how you get there? They could have run away instead of accepting your invitation, made all our work that much harder. All this training and you still won’t allow me to go further than I can see the castle from, why couldn’t you have simply sent me out there to -- ”

“Why are my methods something that you feel the need to question, Medusa?”

It was unlikely that Medusa had missed the trace of venom in her older sister’s tone, as attuned to the behavior of others as she was. So the only conclusion for Arachne to draw from the way she continued to press the issue was that the girl was simply ignoring it, which would not do at all. 

“Because I don’t understand, so I’m asking. I don’t like not knowing things, important or not,” she said bluntly. “And you told me -- ”

“What don’t you understand about the instructions that I give you, Medusa?” Arachne cut her off sharply. “You put on airs of superiority to the whole castle, don’t think I don’t see it. And yet you find yourself unable to understand the simple role to which you’ve been entrusted?”

“I -- ”

“Silence. You’re too old to be whining like a child to me. And if you’re going to behave like a child you’re going to be treated like one. I had planned to allow you out of the castle to command the mission to Lubomira’s territory, and guard our people while we mine there,” Arachne said with a dismissive wave of her hand, in reality having planned nothing of the sort, “but as it’s so unbecoming of you to demand such a thing of me, you’ll receive no such privilege. And it is a privilege; you are being trained to fight, but that does not mean you are mature enough to face the outside world.”

“Mature enough to -- Onee-sama, I’m trying to help you, I just -- !” 

Medusa’s protests fell into choking and coughing with a sharper wave of Arachne’s hand and a flash of her eyes, as the younger girl’s tongue was tied, paralyzed, and yanked out of her mouth by a sudden binding of shimmering silver thread. Arachne clenched a loose fist in the air to tighten it, to widen Medusa’s eyes with fear and have her grabbing at her mouth in panic. It was not enough force to actually tear the organ from its roots, but it was certainly enough to feel like it would.

“You will not take that tone with me,” Arachne said in a voice of iron, narrowing her eyes. “And you will do as you are told, for the sake of our family, not to satisfy your own childish urges.”

Medusa’s face had gone as pale as the webbing that trapped her tongue, and only tiny, terrified squeaks were coming up from her throat now. Her fingers scraped at her face and throat, becoming slick with the saliva running from her frozen mouth, and her breath came in short and rapid spurts from her nose. No matter how many times her disrespect was punished this way, Arachne reflected, she never seemed to get used to it. The panic response to the lack of air was too deeply ingrained in the mind and body for that.

She, on the other hand, had gotten the pattern down like clockwork. She gave it one, two, three more seconds, that she was sure felt longer to Medusa, before dissolving the webbing with a snap of her fingers and letting her sister go. Medusa dropped to her knees, desperately coughing and swallowing, her slim frame shaking with the relief of breath. Arachne gave it another moment before striding up to the girl, gripping her tight by the jaw, and hauling her to her feet.

“We all have a role to play in this family, Medusa,” she hissed. “We stay alive and stable only by my design. Do you seek to destroy our hard-won peace and safety, and lead us into ruin?”

“N-No! Of course not!”

“Then cast aside your foolish ambitions and remember your place, girl.” 

Arachne released Medusa and let her drop. The second the girl’s feet touched the floor she was backpedaling to get out of her sister’s reach, but once there, she stood frozen and shaking: still awaiting permission before she ran away. Arachne almost smirked.

“I expect you, Karasu, and Shaula back here, at the dinner table, in exactly three hours. And do try to wear something appropriate,” she added, disdainfully watching Medusa’s wet fingers scrape against the rough black fabric of her pants. “Even your brothers manage to dress more presentably than that. Dismissed.”

Medusa was spinning around and out the door on the very first syllable. Arachne was of the opinion that her Vector Plates were more likely to send her in the correct direction when she wasn’t thinking too hard about it, merely letting her instincts guide her, and that that might be something to have her test later on with Giriko. Or perhaps Karasu, he was more experienced with magical combat at the moment. But not yet. Medusa would enjoy that, and she could not give the girl pleasure while she was still supposed to be reflecting on her poor behavior.

Later, she would make such suggestions, and perhaps work out a way for the girl’s straining at the leash to be calmed. Surely there was a small mission she could send her on, a little way outside the reaches of their current territory, to placate her and test how she fared in situations that were not sparring matches, executions, or the occasional dispatching of attempted invaders. Of course, Shaula needed that attention too, but of course she was younger and Medusa was the stronger prospect in both body and will, so her priority was clear. She would converse with her brother after dinner, she decided; Karasu was ever-loyal, but she would not put half so great a value on that loyalty were it not for his calm demeanor and blunt manner of speaking. 

But, that was for later. She had one more appointment for this afternoon before she could retire to her chambers, she remembered, as she called in the other lackeys outside the doors to carry away Arya’s body and head, and wash her blood from the stone. She took her place back on the center of her web, and only had to wait a few more minutes in her again-pristine throne room before a much more appealing audience strutted in: her top lab assistant.

“My lady.” Ourania Symponia greeted her with a deep and elegant curtsy, having changed from her usual lab robes into a fine dress. “You are looking radiant today.”

Arachne smiled; flattery was not quite enough to soften her up to anyone, but she did have to admit it felt nice. “And the same to you. I’m sure you heard how today’s negotiations went?”

“Oh, yes.” Ourania’s eyes -- a truly nauseating shade of purple -- glittered with delight as she grinned back. Her familiar was, if Arachne recalled, the eagle, but she looked more like a starving shark as she grinned back. “How soon will we deploy troops to Arya’s territory? I’d prefer to take them alive for this first time, so we can safely recover their souls.”

“Yes, of course, but I don’t know if I’d like to send regular troops. Such a delicate operation after all, and theirs are such clumsy hands. Perhaps your younger sisters, if I may be so bold?”

Arachne pretended to consider it before shaking her head. “No, they’re far too young. They don’t know how to handle delicate tasks just yet. My little brother and Mosquito will go instead. I want you to prepare a holding space for roughly seventy new arrivals, and brief the lab staff on the investigative procedures we’ll start by carrying out on all of them. You received my reports on the latter?”

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“You have no complaints about any of the staff assigned you? I can easily transfer or dispose of them if you think that they’ll be any trouble.”

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

Arachne tilted her head and added another measure of sweetness to her smile. “While we’re on the subject, Ourania, dear...How is your little girl? Has she been helpful with your work?”

Ourania’s grin faded, and even her intricately piled brown curls seemed to sag. She wasn’t upset, she never was upon being reminded of her spawn’s existence: merely confused. “She...is fine, my lady. Never caused any problems, to my knowledge.”

“How old is she now?” Always a humorous question.

The other witch blinked. “I...Forty-five, I think? Half-breeds are so inconsistent, what with when they freeze in form. Around the range of your middle sister, I’m sure!”

“Yes, I believe you,” Arachne nearly laughed. She considered adding next time you recognize her, give her my condolences, but she didn’t care quite that much. “Now, if we could move on to your monthly reports...”

~0~

Medusa only made it halfway back to her room on her Vector Plates before she had to skid to a stop and rest, both to catch her breath and to keep from succumbing to the urge to vomit. 

She caught a glimpse of the edges of black robes flying out into the air, as their owners wisely fled from their angry young mistress. As well they should: she was too spent to pounce on them, to rip off their masks so she could dig her nails into their lips and mouths, but she always had her arrows if she couldn’t move. Her body sagged with exhaustion against the wall, and she pressed her forehead against the rough but cool stone wall to still the spinning in her head, hugging her stomach to try and soothe the nausea. She resisted the urge to give the inside of her own mouth another scrape with her fingers, instead feeling around with the tip of her tongue to make sure she had gotten all the residual webbing out, and scratching the wet bits of it out from underneath her nails. Of course, there was always the primal fear of some of it having gotten down her throat too, but she’d only ever choked up a web ball once, and she was not about to play a fool at her bathroom sink trying to hack up another one just in case. No matter how many times this happened, she could never decide whether it was more humiliating or disgusting. 

One day, she thought, biting her lip, one day I am going to figure out exactly where that fine line between “speaking my mind” and “talking back” is, and never cross the damned thing again. 

Even after her brief respite, Medusa still felt...diseased was the only real word for it, she decided. Her tongue and mouth were numb, her stomach churning, and every inch of her skin crawled as if she’d been dipped in ice water. It was a slow walk down the rest of the hallway, as she still felt shaky in every limb but refused to hold on to the wall any more for support. What if someone saw her?

Karasu often tried to tell her that such a thing was an unfounded worry, especially on those occasions where she made an effort to frighten everyone away from her wrath. But on this particular occasion, it turned out that she had been the one right all along. 

“Y-Young mistress?” 

She snapped her head to the side, glaring hellfire in the general direction of the tiny voice, which turned out to belong to an equally tiny girl. The girl startled back, holding an arm reflexively across her heart, but did not run away. Medusa wasn’t sure if she liked that. 

“What do you want?” she snarled. 

The girl blinked, with wide eyes a deep shade of violet. “I...All I wanted was...Are you okay, young mistress?”

Medusa straightened up as best she could, and lifted her head to look superciliously down her nose at the girl. She wasn’t dressed in the usual shapeless robes and mask of Arachnophobia, instead a long but simple black dress, her hair tied up in a bun over her heart-shaped face. So she was someone here...or perhaps was connected to someone.

“What’s your name?”

“Nephele Symponia, ma’am.”

“Can’t you speak above a whimper, little thing? And why does your surname sound familiar?” she added, before the girl could answer the first question. To her credit, she did speak a little louder, though the softness of her tone remained the same. 

“My mother helps Arachne-sama in her lab. Ourania?” Seeing a glint of recognition in Medusa’s eyes, Nephele went on. “I...I’m supposed to help Mother in turn, but...She very rarely gives me anything to do, so...”

Medusa smirked. “So you just drift around the halls like a ghost? With no purpose in being?”

Nephele looked rather taken aback by that. “Well, I was...But then I noticed you, young mistress. And...You don’t look so well. I-If you don’t mind my saying so?”

“Oh?” 

“You’re pale, a-and you just look like you’re in pain...” Her eyes were flicking all over the hall, anywhere but into Medusa’s own. “So I just wanted to...to help. To see if I could, anyway.”

Medusa tilted her head curiously to the side, a smirk still playing on her lips. That was certainly a new occurrence...and an interesting one too. “Is that so?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Now, Medusa had learned from all her efforts in making Shaula’s life miserable that timid little things like this were largely incapable of effectively lying. And over the decades, she tended to grow weary of Shaula at times. Perhaps she was in the market for a new plaything. 

“If that’s really the case, then perhaps I do need an escort back to my room. My training can be quite taxing, you understand.”

“Yes, I’m sure.” 

Nephele tentatively stepped forward and reached out, to close the distance between them, but Medusa flinched back, intensifying her glare to hide that it was a flinch. 

“Don’t touch, girl. Don’t think yourself so special.”

“O-Of course not.” Nephele obediently retracted her hand. “What would you have me do, young mistress?”

“Walk with me. No one will bother us.” 

“As you wish...”

It wasn’t too long of a walk back up to Medusa’s room. Medusa did not care to admit it, but it felt much quicker and easier with her silent companion close beside her, who could help her if she collapsed on the way there. She had done so before, after a different day’s grueling training or strenuous punishment, and either woken up on the floor where she had fallen, with an ache right down to her bones, or unceremoniously dropped on one of her older siblings’ beds, awaiting yet another sharp lecture. Neither option was desirable to her.

When she finally got to push open her bedroom door and walk inside, slipping off her shoes as she did so, Nephele dithered outside in the hall. She said nothing, but was clearly waiting for permission to step in too. Medusa smiled; she seemed quite well trained already.

“Come on in, girl, I don’t bite.”

“Yes, ma’am...” 

Nephele carefully stepped in after her, taking in her surroundings. Medusa didn’t know what sort of lodgings her sister’s lackeys -- and their occasional child, she supposed -- were provided, but she assumed that her own were at least slightly more comfortable. Walls painted such a dark violet they were nearly black, a thick carpet only a few shades lighter, and a small window covered by a thick black curtain. A large, soft red-quilted bed, surrounded by empty lanterns that lit with a spell to warm her cold blood, especially helpful in the winter months. The dingy mirror, the desk covered in papers and books, and an equally packed bookshelf near the bed, were the only other furniture in the spacious room. 

“It’s...emptier than I would have expected,” Nephele remarked. “N-No disrespect, young mistress.”

Medusa shrugged. “Of course. I have my tastes, others have theirs. Is it to your liking, Nephele?”

Nephele almost looked startled at the sound of her own name. “Y-Yes, ma’am,” she blurted. 

“Good.” Medusa paused, looking the girl over from head to foot. “Relax, Nephele. Attention isn’t such a frightening thing, is it?”

“No...No, I don’t suppose so.” She made only a halfway successful effort to release the tension in her body; her arm was still firmly across her heart and gripping her shoulder. “If I may ask, ma’am, what did you bring me in here for? If there’s something else you need, I’ll be happy to get it for you.”

Medusa clicked her tongue reprovingly, and started to slowly circle the girl, continuing to look her over. “No...No, I don’t think I need anything from you. But, would you like a few things from me? In exchange for your devotion to the mistress of the house, of course.”

“I don’t -- I mean, I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, but -- !” Nephele broke off into a startled yelp when she felt Medusa’s fingers slide into her hair. “M-Ma’am?! What -- ”

“Shh. Shh. Hold still. And I won’t hurt you.” Medusa snorted, still smirking. “Be thankful you didn’t end up my older brother’s escort instead.”

Nephele blinked. “K-Karasu-sama...?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of Giriko, but, well, it’s a moot point now.” Medusa finished undoing the girl’s bun, gently guiding her hair as it fell in stiff waves down past her shoulders, petting it to smooth it out. “There. You look much prettier with your hair down, don’t you?”

“I...I’m not sure. My mother always -- ”

“Look in the mirror, girl. Tell me yourself.”

Nephele obeyed, glancing sideways at her reflection. She reached up to play with a loose lock of dark hair between two fingertips, almost curiously. “Yes,” she decided after a moment. “I like it.”

“Good. Because I think you could use a change of clothes, too.”

Medusa considered simply slitting the girl’s dress up from the back, but no. Tempting, but too much. She knew that she had been far too frightened the first time Arachne had done it to her, to forcibly replace an outfit that hadn’t measured up to her standards. So she simply took Nephele by the wrist, and the girl allowed herself to be led over to the closet while Medusa skimmed the contents. Arachne had gifted her most of her clothes, and they were meant for her to wear, but technically she had never said that she couldn’t lend them to another...Especially one who would appreciate them so much more.

After a moment of deliberation, Medusa grabbed a white silk shift from the side of the clothing rack and a violet sash from the drawers at the back, and handed them to Nephele. “I don’t mind if you change in front of me. But if you do, go in the bathroom and do it.”

Nephele still looked quite startled, but obeyed, and a minute later poked her head nervously out of the bathroom doorway. “Y-Young mistress? I’m done...It fits very well, if the sash is done up tight.” 

“Good girl. Let me see,” Medusa said, beckoning her forward with a crook of her finger. 

The girl clearly wasn’t used to showing herself off, but stepped out with a shy smile, standing up a little straighter. “It feels very nice, young mistress. Thank you.”

Medusa smirked again. “It looks nice on you too. Certainly nicer than it would have looked on me. White isn’t my color at all, but with your eyes, your hair, your skin...You make for quite the angel.”

Nephele’s eyes widened, and Medusa could almost see a blush on the tan of her cheeks. “Thank you...” she said, almost awed, as if she had never received any compliment before.

“No, thank you, for coming to me. Run along back to your mother, now, I would rather rest alone. If anyone asks, tell them your new dress was a gift. Don’t let me catch you in your old one, or with your hair up again, understood?”

If Nephele found the order strange, then she didn’t show it, nodding enthusiastically. Medusa wasn’t exactly experienced with reassuring smiles, but she hoped the one she was putting on now was doing the trick. 

“Thank you!” she chirped again, before obediently turning and hurrying out of the room. Such a sweet little voice, but Medusa thought that she much preferred the timorous tone she had introduced herself with. 

She closed her door, wishing she could lock it from the inside, and sat down at her desk. She had intended to write down a recounting of what had happened to her in the throne room today — a journal entry she must have written dozens of times before, but documenting the event and her thoughts always made her feel at least marginally better — before having to endure yet another painfully long meal with her siblings. But she found that her brain was currently more interested in replaying her interactions with the girl. She did not often wonder what went on in Arachne’s head, while she was so adeptly reminding her younger siblings who the mistress of the castle was. But she felt certain she had gotten a taste, with the girl following at her side and obeying her orders, minor as they had been. 

Medusa did not think she would seek out Nephele Symponia again; she had her actual duties to fulfill before she could think of simply pleasing herself, Arachne was always quick to remind her, when the smile on her face grew too carefree. Still, she couldn’t keep such a smile off her face right now, where Arachne couldn’t see it. It wasn’t enough to truly call this a good day, all things considered...But it was enough to start tipping the balance a little in her favor, and right now, that would do just fine.

~0~

The meal -- tedious and tense, but not explosive as some could be -- was followed by a late-night study session and some light exercise before Medusa finally slid into bed, at some time past midnight. 

She had been ordered to rise bright and early for another, briefer meeting with her sister, to be given her latest assignment. Today was already looking up; though she enjoyed training and time to read, it could grow stale without any new work to do in between. And that was before she heard what her new duties were to be.

“In a week’s time, I will receive a shipment of test subjects to the laboratory,” Arachne explained to her, as Medusa knelt before the web, head bowed. “They will be a significant amount, and quite agitated, so after some thought I have decided that you will be in charge of security for the project. Under no circumstances do I want any of them killed or seriously damaged, so I do hope you paid proper attention during your lessons on nonlethal containment of your targets.”

Medusa nodded her head. “Yes, onee-sama, I have. Thank you.”

“You will review them with Karasu in the coming week anyway. Do not fail me, Medusa.”

“I will not, onee-sama. I promise.”

“Leave me, then. And to your work.”

Medusa nodded again, and turned to walk out of the throne room. She walked down the halls with her head high, this time, in search of her brother. Surely he could be persuaded to pause in whatever he was doing to start her altered course of training; whatever he was doing was certainly not as important as -- 

Something familiar caught her eye in the side hall next to her, and she reflexively froze, flexed her fingers ready to summon her sword. But she relaxed in the very next second when her brain caught up with her to register this new shape.

“Nephele? Is that you again?”

Nephele still did not fully come around the corner, but again her eyes glittered at the sound of her name. “G-Good morning, young mistress,” she said with a shy smile. 

Medusa raised an eyebrow, puzzled. “Was there something you needed, girl?”

“I...I’ve been thinking, and...I don’t have anything to give you in return, but I wanted to know...Could I spend a little more time with you? If I’m not too much trouble.”

Medusa paused, then had to restrain herself from grinning too widely. Oh, this could end up being fun.

“Trouble? You? Of course not. I’m going to see my older brother, if you’d like to come with me, you certainly may,” Medusa said sweetly, extending a hand. “I see you did what I said last night. That’s very smart of you.”

The implication seemed to fly straight over the girl’s head as she stepped out into the open and took the offered hand. “Thank you, young mistress,” she said again, a new sheen in those pretty violet eyes.

Such soft skin, Medusa thought as she closed her fingers around Nephele’s hand. Such a delicate thing.

“Just ‘mistress’ will do just fine, angel.”


	4. Chapter Four

Centuries later, in her endless days and nights toiling over the black blood and the little vessel who would contain it, the screams of test subject after test subject would become commonplace to Medusa. So much so, that she would be able to easily tune them out even before they had begun, so she could focus entirely on the goals of her experiment. 

However, as a girl allowed into the castle’s lab for the first time, she had been entirely too entranced by the sound to form any lasting memory of the actual procedures being performed. She had done such a good job herding the first group of human subjects, Arachne had told her later while incessantly stroking at her face and hair, that she had earned the privilege of being permitted to watch her big sister work. Both the sickly-sweet words and the cold fingers in her hair, running through the thick strands from scalp to shoulder blades, turned Medusa’s blood to ice, but she grinned and bore it. 

And it was worth it. 

Sliding a blade through dead flesh? Droplets of blood flicking from her little sister’s scratches? Nothing. Nothing. 

There was no observation window so she stood on the sidelines instead, switching positions after dragging each human into the operating room and strapping them to the table, to find one that would give her the best view. Behind the trays of instruments and wide, blinding white lamps, she stood in the shadows, watching with rapt attention as her sister’s shimmering scalpel blade sunk into stomach, into chest, into eye socket. The blood was quickly siphoned away by her assistants, but that wasn’t what interested her. 

She had never been allowed to view the inner workings of the body so clearly and intimately before. Arachne, for whatever reason, would reprimand her if she tried to take notes during the actual procedures, so she had had to make do with running back to her room and scrawling everything she could remember down in her journals while it was still fresh in her mind. The back of her closet was now piled with the small leather-bound books, holding now just over ten years’ worth of frantic notes along with her daily records.

Even more fascinating was the study of the souls that would raise from whatever cut had finally ended the vivisected subject, ethereal blue and looking good enough to eat, in her opinion. She had never known any of this that Arachne was discussing with her assistants, about the way a soul was affected by personality, or perhaps vice versa, and what indicated and measured the natural strength of a soul, and how that strength could be enhanced -- !

“Have you ever heard of anything so amazing in your life, Nephele?” she burst out, taking a brief break from filling page after page with ink to stretch out her cramping hand.   
The young half-breed, whose face had barely grown older but whose eyes had turned far darker over the years, did not quite meet her gaze. “Yes, mistress.”

It was Nephele’s most often repeated phrase, nowadays. But it was never one she tired of hearing, especially in the privacy and intimacy of their own bedroom.

“I think we’re doing fairly well in that lab, don’t you?”

“Yes, we are.”

Medusa turned in her desk chair to smirk at the girl sitting on their bed. “You’re much better off following my orders than your mother’s, aren’t you?”

“I am, mistress.”

Such exchanges were common between them, when they were alone together. She hadn’t pushed this particular button in a while, so she added one more question. “When is the last time you’ve seen your mother?”

Nephele still wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Not...Not in some time.”

“When is the last time she spoke to you?”

“...Even longer, mistress.” 

Medusa could almost hear the you know that that Nephele was surely biting back, but did not comment on it. Give it a few years, she told herself, and that too would be worn away just like the spark in the girl’s eyes. She got up from her desk chair, crossed the room, and took Nephele’s face in both her hands. When she kissed her, she could feel the twitch run through her body as if to pull away, but at the same time, Nephele could not resist pressing her lips deeper against Medusa’s. Always the little movements that gave her away, all the reflexes of a body and heart still starved for touch and love. 

She ran her hands down Nephele’s neck and shoulders, pushing the loose straps of her shift down her arms. She kept the girl in nothing but simple white, after some trial and error as to what she enjoyed seeing her in the best. But before she could take it any further, a sharp rapping at her bedroom door made them both jump.

Nephele froze, while Medusa’s head slowly roved around to glare at the door. “Yes?”

The door opened to reveal Karasu leaning in the entryway, and Nephele immediately startled backward, tugging her dress back up. She wasn’t given to blushing, but the nervous tremors in her voice gave her away every time. “K-Karasu-sama, I’m sorry, I — “

“Quiet, angel.” Medusa hopped off the bed and went to stand between her brother and her lover. “Did you need something?”

Karasu smiled, even in the face of his sister’s bitter tone. “Sorry to interrupt. But you’ll be a little more cheerful in a minute, I expect. Report to the front gates in two hours, Medusa: you and I are deploying.”

Medusa’s eyes went wide. “Deploying...? For what?”

“You’re smart, you can put it together. Arachne’s had me hunting every corner of the earth for unique souls to study, and I’ve finally found some. Pack your bags, little sister. We’re going to Japan.”

Surprise forced something like a laugh up from Medusa’s throat. “But...But onee-sama keeps saying...”

Karasu shrugged, still grinning. “Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe I helped push that along. Either way, you’d better not be late, hm — Oh!”

Medusa had thrown herself at her brother and hugged him around the chest: she hadn’t done it in decades, but she knew he loved it. “Thank you!” she cried, with as much exuberance as she could shove into it. “Thank you!”

Karasu’s smile warmed as he wrapped an arm around her in return. “Just follow my lead and do your best. I know you’re skilled. Play your cards right, and onee-sama will see that clearly.”

~0~

The Nakatsukasa family, according to her brother’s briefing, were a clan of seventy-six living in Hokkaido. 

They had pledged loyalty to Shinigami, and possessed a unique malleability in their souls that had caught Arachne’s interest. They were skilled in the use of bladed weapons, but not tremendously so, and so they were largely useless on the combat front. They were instead protected by a surrounding community of two others, smaller but more powerful: the Mominoki clan and Hyoukin clan, strongholds of Shinigami’s followers in Japan. Karasu, older and stronger, was in charge of infiltration and containment of the Nakatsukasa. Medusa’s duty was to lead the vanguard that crushed the Mominoki and Hyoukin warriors, keeping them away from Karasu’s squad until all of the subjects were secured and already being transported back to the castle. She had received those orders with true relish, and spent every day of their travel sparring with her brother. She could only ever bring him to a draw, but that was fine. All it did was whet her appetite.

When they arrived finally in the correct region of Hokkaido, it was nightfall before a near-full moon. Scouts sent forward confirmed that the enemy laid in complacency merely ten miles away. Karasu was before them all, a small sea of black robes and white masks, his own dark cloak billowing in the night wind as he began their march forward.

“Remember your orders. We fear not to die in the name of Arachne Gorgon, but I seek to lose no warrior under my command. Struggle to keep your last breath, so that we may all return to our lady in greatest triumph!”

A great roar of assent answered him. Shaula had been sent with them as well, to tag along behind Karasu and test out her new paralytic poisons, and her small cracking voice joined the battle cry. But she was of no concern to Medusa, who merely smirked and followed Karasu when he charged for the edge of the hill they camped by and transformed in a flash of black, becoming a raven soaring above the tall grass fields, blending into the starless sky and leading their way with his shrill caws. 

The sharp and clean smell of the cold night, the thunder of running booted feet on the hard earth behind her, the almost-scent of all the blood she was about to spill...All these pierced his heart like white-hot needles and set her own blood aflame. She sprinted across the field as if possessed by a beast, driven even faster forward by the small orange drops of flame in the distance, that signaled the enemy. So perhaps they were trying to be vigilant. It would do them no good. 

Adrenaline both spurred and numbed her body, and as she burst out from the shadows onto the enemy -- Mominoki or Hyoukin; she didn’t know and it didn’t matter -- it was as if everything in her mind narrowed down to only one thing, one action, one goal. All her ambition and all her knowledge fell away, leaving only the flames of lust. 

Again and again she raised her sword and swung it, slashing hard through sinew and bone, bisected bodies falling heavily to the ground again and again and again. She flew through air and through feeble wooden structures alike on Vector Plates, and her feet only rarely touched the ground. She was a storm made flesh, a flurry of blades, flashing towards the sight of armor glinting in the firelight or the whites of the humans’ eyes as if pulled by some magnetism. None of them would so much as move to touch her brother as he worked. She did not keep count of how many fell before her, but with every one, she felt ever more in ecstasy. 

Blood spattered her with every slice, the coating over her arms growing thicker and thicker. It triggered a dim memory of her mother, having slain a witch hunter after her and Shaula. She remembered Minerva’s own arms, slick with the hunter’s own fresh blood, reaching out from her black cloak and robes to console her little children. She did not remember the comfort, the soft words in the older witch’s mother tongue. But, she remembered the strict edict her mother had used the kill to impose on her.

You are witches, my daughters. Treat your heritage with grace. You must grow to be practitioners of the great art that we inherit, not the savage beasts that the world will see you as. You must never use your power for slaughter, only for protection. The sway you feel inside you to do otherwise, you must restrain. Do you understand me?

Medusa did not understand, had never understood. Perhaps if her mother were around now, instead of ripped apart and consumed by flame for her weakness, she might have...But she did not think she cared to, anyway.

Mother...Oh, my mother. Why, why, would you have wanted to keep such a pleasure from me?!

She did not know how many she herself had slain. Death screams and metal clashing rang in her ears. Swords and sickles swung blurrily through the air at her, and though logically she was sure some must have hit, if only a scratch, she couldn’t feel a single thing. Warriors in Shinigami’s employ they might be, but they were still nothing against a full-blooded witch of a great family.

Her sword slammed into a lock with the long iron pike of a soldier being particularly stubborn about dying here: Hyoukin, she could finally tell, from the style of his armor. 

“You filthy witch,” he snarled, eyes blazing. “When Shinigami-sama finds you, he’ll cut you all down for this!”

Medusa grinned, and hissed back in her broken Japanese, “He won’t. I’m different than you. Your master only sees you as fodder. Now die and play that part!”

The Vector Blade scraped against the iron as Medusa slid it rapidly down the iron, slicing off first the human’s fingers and then his head, in one more swift movement. His body had not even fallen yet before her eyes were flicking around the fiery wreckage, searching for their next target. But before she could find it, she caught the sound of her brother’s cawing above her again, and it sparked an unexpectedly strong surge of rage at the signal of the end. 

She looked around the field again, and saw fire all around her, barracks in burning pieces, mangled bodies as far as the eye could see in armor and robes alike. Her front and face were spattered with blood, and her hands and arms as thoroughly covered in the stuff as if she’d dunked them in it. She had no idea how much of it was theirs, and how much of it might be hers. She felt no pain, only hunger burning just as strong as before, the itch in her hands and legs to keep moving.

She looked upon the carnage, her handiwork, illuminated by the fire and moon. She looked upon it, and her heart rose with joy at it all. Arachne would see her return home powerful and victorious, would see her smile in a way that nothing else made her do, and she would finally understand that she could be trusted with these things.

Certain that she had passed whatever test her sister had had in mind for her, Medusa turned on her heel and launched herself away again, off to support the transport team. Dozens of booted feet followed behind her, but she did not look back to check the difference in numbers between their initial charge and now. 

Allies and enemies alike, they were nothing compared to her.

~0~ 

The harvest moon was glowing full and gold above the castle towers the night after they returned from their mission. 

“I appreciate your cleaning all that blood off before kissing me again,” was Nephele’s flatly expressed opinion on her body count. “I know you must have loved showing off to your siblings.”

Medusa smirked down at the girl leaning on the windowsill, while she sat on the rough-shingled spire just above it. It was not quite cold enough out yet to disgust her, only to make her a little lightheaded, which she didn’t much mind. “Apparently Shaula’s poisons worked almost as well as nii-chan’s shadow binding. Some of the subjects that she got were still in a sluggish state from it when they were transferred to the lab, so onee-sama’s been giving her the silent treatment since she gave her report.”

Nephele nodded. “Which frees up her attention for you.”

“She’s sending nii-chan and aniki off on another scouting mission, so she can give me coordinates to hit the next time she sends me out.” The words still gave Medusa a thrill. “She wants to know whether I can perform covert operations as well as simple massacres.”

“...Covert operations?”

“She’s letting me in on the next stage of her experiments,” Medusa explained. She fought to keep her voice from trembling too much with excitement. “I’m to hunt down witch souls.”

Nephele tried and failed to hide the revulsion on her face, and Medusa laughed. “For their transformative properties. Think about it. If a human ingesting human souls is gradually transformed into a Kishin, then what can a witch’s soul do to the body? No other witch in history has explored the possibilities, and now we’re going to. You get to help, too. Aren’t you excited?”

“Um...” 

Medusa laughed at the awkward silence. “Don’t worry. Onee-sama isn’t interested in finding out what half-witch souls do.”

Nephele flinched. “My mother never took me to any witch masses or any such thing, so it isn’t as if I know any other witches than you and your family. Still, it feels wrong...As if killing your own sisters.”

Medusa laughed even harder. “Oh, my angel. There’s only one sister I have to care about, and she’s the one ordering me onto this path.”

She jumped to her feet, tail waving to keep her balance, summoned the Vector Blade to her hand and pointed it to the moon like a challenge. 

“We are going to break into every forbidden realm. We will rob the gods blind of their arrogance and hidden knowledge. And we will have the power to rock this world to its core. It’s always been so still, like stagnant water; wouldn’t you love to see some excitement here for once?”

“Is that what Arachne-sama says as well?” Nephele asked, in a tone that Medusa couldn’t place and wasn’t sure she liked. “Was there any particular reason that she had you come on your own to her chambers to give your report, when you returned?”

Medusa froze for a moment, looking at her blankly, fiercely resisting the urge to scratch at her choker. Her smile hung there as if painted on, before she snickered again, like a ripple in the water. “Were you jealous, then, angel? Did you miss me?”

Before Nephele could respond, Medusa banished her sword and flipped in through the open window again, forcing her to quickly retreat. The young witch did not stop when her bare feet touched carpet, backing Nephele up until she fell backward onto the bed. She laid absolutely still as her mistress climbed up after her, starting to run her hands sensuously over the white silk, the brown leather belt, the small knife strapped to it that Nephele knew how to use but never would. Not on her.

The wide-eyed rigidity of a rabbit under the fangs of a snake was a feeling that Medusa knew well, from both of their experiences. Nephele understood far more of that latter point than she was ever willing to say out loud, to Medusa’s face or anyone else’s, and once again Medusa congratulated herself on her choice in obedient pet.

“Do you speak to anyone when I’m not here?”

“No, mistress.”

“Do you leave this room?”

“I see no need to, mistress.”

“What did you do when I left you, Nephele?”

“Counted down the days until your safe return. Tried not to picture all the gruesome things that might have prevented such a thing...” The thing that tugged at Nephele’s lips could not quite be called a smirk, but it was similar enough to put the word in her head. “Young mistress.” 

Medusa grimaced, gripping her shoulders tight enough to bruise. “We’ll make to make this a homecoming routine, me teaching you to watch your tongue, brazen girl.”

“You sound like Arachne-sa -- ” The rest of the honorific crescendoed into a shriek, as Medusa sank her teeth into Nephele’s neck. 

This was going to be a long first night back, before she left again. And she would be remiss if she did not leave reminders for proper behavior. How else did a proper trainer work, after all?

~0~

Arachne was far more relaxed in her bed. 

She stroked a snoring Giriko’s hair as he lay next to her, unroused by the salacious sounds coming from the crystal ball next to her. Sometimes tuning in to the feed from those gems in her siblings’ collars could produce such interesting results. Perhaps Medusa was assuming that her elder sister was asleep. A foolish thing, to try and get around her ever-present sight. But still, an amusing one, even leaving aside another of her little sister’s obvious attempts to assert dominance over something, after being so harshly reminded of her place.

(Medusa lay on her back, a soaking wet heap on the carpet. “O-Onee-sama...”

“Do you understand?” Arachne knelt on the floor next to her, stroking the girl’s face and feeling her tense up to avoid squirming. She did not hold back her smile. “Tell me what you did wrong.”

“I...I-I got too caught up...I didn’t look out for the t-troops under my c-c-command...”

“That’s right. You lost control of your lust. You let the sway control you. Do you think yourself so important that I can afford to have you do that?”

“N-No...”

“Tell me so, then.”

“I’m not...” Medusa swallowed hard. “I-I’m not important...onee-sama.”

“Good. Very good. You’ve retained some of your lessons, I suppose. Consider yourself lucky that I’ll ever allow you out of this castle again.”

“Y-Yes...Of course...”

“Now...” Arachne’s fingers slipped under the collar of the wet black shirt, and started to peel it off. “Let’s get you back into something dry, while I explain what role I’ve decided you’re better suited to. Really, you’d look so pretty if you just tried to, but it seems you need my help for everything...”)

Arachne allowed herself a small, smug smile. Medusa would go still and pliant under her hands in an instant, even without the aid of her paralyzing web, and she did so love the little doll she had made out of the fierce beast her little sister still tried to present herself as. All but she had fallen for the ploy, Arachne thought. 

She, and perhaps little Nephele too. The half-breed’s whimpers and gasps were soft enough to be nearly lost under the hissing, scratching, and frustrated growling of her partner. 

Just a little animal, aren’t you? Well, so long as you’re leashed, my dear, it is of no concern to me. 

Arachne lifted her eyes from the dual images, of skin and lips, nails and blood, within the crystal and looked out past the curtains of her one small window. She had a perfect view of the harvest moon in all its deep golden glory. 

This mission’s loot, the seventy-six men, women, and children huddled sobbing in cages in the laboratory levels of the castle, would be the beginning of something truly great, if her hypotheses were correct. Not wanting to write both of her sisters off as useless just yet, she had decided to see if solo work suited Medusa better, and if she could utilize the potential for subtlety that Arachne sensed she had, in a way that would benefit her. And, well, if she didn’t...Arachne could always claim ignorance of her little sister’s ambitious jaunt into another witch’s domain. It wasn’t as if Medusa would be around to contradict her anymore, if she failed.

Her smile broadened. Shinigami and the Elder Witch alike would roar for her head, when her greatest research yet began, but she had long since accepted that price. It was she who would stand atop the world when the dust cleared, after all. It would be her name burned into the annals of history.

(And the name Minerva Gorgon, by contrast, would disappear from it, like so much ash in the wind.)


	5. Chapter Five

Nephele Symponia’s life was one of unchanged routine, largely. 

Wake up next to Medusa. Take meals with Medusa. Follow at Medusa’s heels, or kneel waiting for her to finish things, if they were inside the castle together. Sit in their bedroom and occupy herself with her mistress’ books or pen and paper, if Medusa was gone, as she was far more often these days. Fall asleep next to Medusa wishing she were alone, or fall asleep alone and feel a strangle curling in her stomach that craved the witch’s presence. Hugging her pillow just wasn’t a proper substitute for human contact anymore. Not that the constant presence at her side was technically human, but she cared little for the semantics of the matter.

There was very little she did care about, really. Her life had always been empty and hollow, but in the past decades, Medusa Gorgon had siphoned her dry in a way she had never thought possible. She hates that girl from all those years ago, who had so willingly taken the smiling witch’s hand. She hates the unchanging half-breed of those years progressing, who had so very easily fallen into the role of a silent puppet...or punching bag, depending on the level of stress Arachne decided to pile onto her sister’s shoulders that day. And she hates herself now, for still letting herself be led along on the bloodstained path that Medusa sought to walk.

You don’t let yourself, snapped the tiny defiant voice that manifested itself in the first few years, under her tongue and at the back of her skull. She won’t let you do anything else. Because Arachne-sama won’t let her do anything else. And you have no say in any of this.

That was correct. She was a shadow, a being of no consequence, no thought, and no feeling. Still, she always had trouble with that last point, when she followed Medusa down the steep stone stairs into the castle’s laboratory.

She flinched along with the rest of the caged humans in the east containment unit when Medusa quite unnecessarily slammed open its heavy metal door, and unconsciously rubbed the finger-shaped bruises on her bare arm as she stepped inside after her.

“Good morning, all of you!” Her mistress was of the opinion that her false friendliness was convincing. Nephele certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell her no. “I’m sure you’re excited to find out which of you gets to help in my sister’s experiments today, aren’t you?”

She resisted the urge to sigh. “Mistress, please, don’t drag this out too long. Arachne-sama won’t be happy if the one task she gave you takes too long for her liking.”

“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it, Nephele.” Medusa was already pacing around among the neat rows of cages, glancing at each human inside, paying Nephele no real attention.

Well, just glaring at her back wouldn’t be productive at all. No, ever since their last visit turned out...less than pleasant for multiple people, she had had a plan for the next one. After making sure that her mistress isn’t looking, she darted to the back of the room, to the cage marked H-715. Her lady went through so many human subjects, but damn if she didn’t keep them all so very carefully organized. H-715, as she had discovered last week, was a little boy of maybe seven or eight, with tangled dirty blond hair, dark eyes, and a ringed collar around his neck, who looked extremely startled to see her come straight up to him. 

“Hello, there,” she whispered, trying her best to look comforting. She knew the boy could hear and understand her, so it didn’t matter if he spoke back or not. Truthfully, she was hoping not. “I’m sorry for what happened the last time we were here. You must have been very scared. Here...To make up for that.”

She hadn’t been able to get the image of the boy’s sunken cheekbones and protruding ribcage out of her mind since the last time. Arachne kept her subjects in varying states of health, to see if it would have any effect on a successful weapon transformation. Medusa only controlled her diet insofar as they ate and drank the exact same things, so she hadn’t noticed when Nephele had slipped a bit of the leftover bread from breakfast from her plate and into her pocket. It was this morsel that she now offered to the boy, who looked at it as if it was a precious jewel, and reached out in disbelief to take it -- 

Wham. 

The next thing Nephele knew, she was landing hard on the flat stone floor, feeling like she’d just been clubbed in the gut. Logically, she knew that her mistress moved like a flash, but her ever-growing cynical side rebuked her for not seeing the kick coming. 

“Good job, Nephele, you found my little friend!” Nephele really wished that Medusa would knock off that fake affection bit; it could get downright nauseating at times. It didn’t come to her anywhere near as naturally as it did to her elder sister. “I wonder why they moved you all the way over here -- not because of what you almost made me do the last time I saw you, I hope?”

Nephele hadn’t been at all amused or gratified at the very undignified screech Medusa had let out, upon having her eye scratched by the terrified and struggling subject she’d been dragging out of the cage. Only petrified with fear and then with relief at only having to hear the sound of a pounding fist, rather than breaking bones or falling limbs, before Arachne had appeared to call her sister off. That same fear kept her frozen on the ground now as Medusa tried again.

“You’ll do perfectly for today. Come here.”

“No, I don’t wanna, let me go!”

She winced as the sound of the slap echoed through the room. 

“No one cares what you want, brat. And I am not going to deal with you giving me a hard time every time I try to bring you up there, do you understand? Onee-sama wouldn’t let me hurt you too badly last time, but if you ever fight me like that again I’ll break both your arms in ten different places. Truth be told, I’m angry enough that all she’ll allow me to do in the labs is herd you useless things around, so I don’t think you want to push me any further.”

Every time Nephele heard that fierce snap in her mistress’ voice, she’d woken up sore the next morning. Still, she thought it a good sign that she was still not so far gone as to be glad that the child was on the receiving end instead of her. Far from it; her gut went cold at the reminder of what they were about to drag him off to.

She picked herself up from the floor before she was ordered to, and felt even sicker at the sight of the boy’s tears and Medusa’s vicious grin. 

“You see what your pure heart gets you and everyone around you, angel? I told you it would be a bad idea to keep it.”

Nephele sighed, tried to keep a level breath. She didn’t know why she did things like this anymore. To try and balance out the things she had done in the Gorgon family’s service? To pretend to be a good person? To spite her mistress? She supposed it didn’t do any good to think about it.

“Let’s not waste any more time. Arachne-sama is waiting for us.”

There was only one set of rooms in the castle that she hated more than the containment rooms, and that was the operating and experimental chambers. Medusa had promised that the scientists here would never touch her, that a half-breed’s soul was too weak and tainted by its human half to be of any use to Arachne. But every time she helped strip the humans and strap them, squirming and whining, to the steel tables, she couldn’t keep from seeing herself restrained there instead. 

The boy was so small and thin, and the straps so thick, it was as if he was being enveloped by them. His eyes were no longer on Nephele, but on Arachne, who was standing over the table looking him over as dispassionately as if he were a rat. After some deliberation, she ordered a half dose to be brought, and a masked assistant darted off to retrieve it.

“And don’t mess it up!” Medusa’s sharp call had the assistant nearly skidding around the corner in startled haste, and she grinned again. “We’ve had enough failures, haven’t we, onee-sama?”

Nephele wished that just once, she could have a proper conversation with her mistress without being talked in circles or shouted down, so that she could steer her away from the storm that darkened Arachne’s eyes at the sound of the word “we.” The assistant returning with the half-filled syringe distracted the older witch, but Nephele could feel herself pale at the sight of the lurid purple liquid within it. Who had it come from, she wondered?

“Now, there’s nothing to be afraid of, little one...” The sickly-sweet, motherly tone of Arachne’s voice made the hair on Nephele’s arms and neck stand straight on end, and she hugged herself tight. “Just one quick injection, this won’t hurt one bit.”

Nephele wondered, as always, whether that was supposed to be a joke. Medusa laughed at it, at any rate, which invited another glare from her sister.

“Medusa, do you want to be next on this table?”

Medusa jumped badly, paling and taking a step back. It wasn’t a threat that Arachne made often, so it hit dead center whenever she did. Nephele had the strangest urge to take her hand, but knew that the gesture of comfort would not be appreciated. “N-No, onee-sama, I don’t,” she blurted.   
“I didn’t think so. I let you down here because I think even you can learn something from silent observation.” Every word was clipped and icy. “If you can’t do what I tell you to, then you might be helping with my experiments in a much different way than you want. Do you understand?"

“Yes, onee-sama. Forgive me.”

“Good girl. Now...” She lifted the syringe, smiled at the terrified child, and every instinct Nephele had screamed at her to look away. “You’ve been worked so hard up until now...Are you ready to become my newest weapon, little one?”

The needle -- the absolutely giant needle -- sunk deep into the boy’s neck, and Nephele’s gasp of horror was drowned out by his series of keening shrieks. Nephele knew that things were not like they had been twenty or even ten years ago, and that the chances of the boy melting into a hot fleshy puddle and her needing to mop him off the table and floor were slim now. But still, it did not make it any less nauseating to see the child change, like molten metal under the rapid hands of a mad blacksmith, bubbling and stretching and twisting, managing to keep screaming with a misshapen mouth as his soul decided on his body’s new form.

A new state of being...but one nowhere near as miraculous as Arachne and Medusa’s identical maniacal grins might indicate.   
“Yes,” Arachne breathed. “Excellent. Not much longer now, little one, soon you’ll be perfect.”

Medusa snickered appreciatively, and Nephele dug her nails into her arms as she hugged herself tighter. She still felt faint even when it was done, and there was a short golden rod with two long pointed ends. She had no name for it, and looked to Medusa, but her mistress was tilting her head to the side in puzzlement. “Onee-sama, what is it?”

Arachne was still smiling, stroking the engraved gold with her fingertips, uncaring of the hissing burn it produced. “It’s a vajra. A tool from India.” Her voice rose slightly in pitch as she addressed the consciousness that might or might not have remained intact inside the weapon. “Did you think yourself a brave bolt of thunder, little one? We’ll have some fun testing your abilities.”

“Onee-sama,” Medusa spoke up, “may I please help this time? I, I’ve been thinking, and I have some ideas for their combat training that -- ”

Arachne gave her a smile so patronizing that Nephele nearly cringed under it too. “Well. Your manners are impeccable when you want something, little sister.”

“I -- ”

“When I want your help, Medusa, I will tell you. This is important research and I’ll not have you contaminating it. For now, what you can do is go get N-46 out from the west containment room. I want to run some more tests on its ono form after I’m done with this. And check on your brother while you go through.”

Medusa lifted her head and straightened her shoulders, trying not to look young and crestfallen. It did not work very well. “Yes, onee-sama. Excuse me...”

Nephele inclined her head respectfully with a soft, “My lady,” and trotted after Medusa as she strode out of the room. The Nakatsukasa clan was now down roughly thirty members after being subjected to years of experimentation, but the survivors were all successful transformations, albeit with varying degrees of success. They were the first successes, the first human weapons, words that still sent Nephele’s head reeling, and they were the examples upon which all the rest of the human subjects were based and compared to. As such, they were kept in a separate containment room altogether, the smaller and securer one on the west side of the lab. 

Medusa’s body was tense as they walked through the white tile corridors, and Nephele put on her best combination of casual and comforting. If the witch so much as sensed pity or more condescension, it would earn Nephele a sharp slice with a Vector Arrow. “Mistress, if you wouldn’t mind running your plans past me later, I would love to hear them.”

Medusa huffed. “Do you think me the type to ramble?”

“No, mistress.”

“That’s right. So if you’re trying to take my mind off of this, you’ll have to try harder.”

Nephele sighed again. “No chance of that, I think. What is it that you want to do, then?”

They walked in silence for a few more minutes, until they stopped at the window of the lab infirmary. Nephele followed Medusa’s gaze to Giriko, lying supine on a bed and being tended to by various assistants, on day five of his medically induced coma. Violet lines ran up and down the veins of his arms and neck, and everywhere visible on his skin was spotted with twisted flesh and metal points sticking up from it. Nephele thought she recognized the points as belonging to a saw blade, and wondered what the special experiment, as Arachne called it, hard fuckin science, as Giriko himself called it, and what is wrong with you aniki don’t do that you’ll die, as Shaula called it, was supposed to be.

“That’s what I want, Nephele.”

Nephele jumped. “What?”

“Not to be the one on the table. I’m worth more than that. I...I deserve to be the one shaping the flesh. Shaping the world. Not just...Not just some...”

Nephele knew that it was not that Medusa couldn’t think of the words. It was simply that she didn’t want to say them out loud. To do so would only cement her position as inferior. So instead of prodding, Nephele simply touched the small of her back. 

“Shall we move on?”

“Yes.” They resumed their former positions, continuing on their way. “Yes, let’s go...”

As they reached the double doors of the clan’s containment unit, Nephele was trying to remember the age and condition of N-46, and steeling her nerves to possibly consign a child in even worse state that H-715 to Arachne’s hands. 

It was her final thought before a devastatingly loud BANG momentarily deafened her, and Medusa’s arrows were flying out in front of her to shield her from both doors being blasted off their hinges at them.


	6. Chapter 6

Nakatsukasa Ichirou, it seemed, had not been as beaten down as he had appeared, since the defeat of his clan. Arachne had known, when his weapon form turned out to have explosive properties, to place him in a more secure location in the unit. It had not helped one bit. And now Ichirou had blown himself to bits, and over a quarter the remaining clan had managed to pour from the castle and out of any of their reach, before Medusa and the lesser security forces had gotten the rest of them under control again.  
Ichirou was out of her reach, but as she understood it, his son Jirou had been the one to lead the remnant of his family away. Medusa did not know what the young sickle looked like, but she thought over and over again that if she ever did see him, she was going to strangle the worthless rat to death for this.  
Feeling disgustingly small and weak under her older sister’s absolutely furious eyes, the thought occurred to her to strangle herself instead.  
“You let them escape.” Oh, she had never wanted to die more than she did right now. “You were right there and you did nothing.”  
“I...I don’t...I...!”  
She was spluttering now. Down on her knees on the hard stone floor of the throne room, she bowed her head lower, making herself appear as small and contrite as possible. No one would take pity on her because of it, of course, but she’d learned by now that the more powerless she seems, the happier Arachne would be.  
“Do you deny that this is your fault?”  
“Onee-sama, I-I’m not denying it, but I -- ”  
“Quiet. Do you think I want to hear your excuses?”  
Before she could work out what the right answer to that was, she startled to hear her brother’s voice next to her doing it for her. “Onee-sama, she’s not making excuses. Not even we knew what Nakatsukasa was planning,” Karasu said, loud and clear, staring up at her with no fear.  
A muscle in Arachne’s jaw twitched again at the word. “Were you being addressed, familiar?”  
Karasu’s eyes narrowed. “You called me here to give my report and I’m giving it. We both fulfilled our orders to the best of our ability, now what I would suggest to you is that you put those abilities to use again as soon as possible to recover the lost subjects and get your lab back under control instead of looking for someone to lash out at.”  
Within seconds, Arachne was mere inches from them, and Medusa couldn’t keep from flinching. The back of her hand striking Karasu’s cheek was a sharp crack that resounding around the room. “Know your place, little brother.”  
Karasu’s head remained still and his steely expression did not falter, as he side-eyed his elder sister. “I do know my place. The place of a familiar is to give the master what she needs, not to obey blindly. Mother knew to listen when I spoke.”  
Medusa winced again at the heavy clang of her sister’s iron fan smacking her brother’s other cheek. Better you than me, nii-chan.  
“And look where that got her! But very well. If you think you know better than me, then get out of here and fix this. Go.”  
“Then I’ll be taking her with me -- ”  
“No. Get out. Her discipline has always been my responsibility.”  
The two glared for a moment more, and Medusa wondered with a start whether any of this had been a recurring argument between the two of them. Finally, Karasu left, and Arachne turned her full attention to Medusa.  
“You know you too have a duty and a responsibility to carry out your missions correctly and completely. I saw you, through your collar. I saw you prioritize your little pet over preserving my property. And you also know the consequences for failing to do your duty, don’t you?”

She had to keep her lips from curling into a sneer. After all these decades of serving her sister, and inevitably slipping up more often than she’d like to admit in that time, of course she knew by now what was in store for her. But as she’d learned to, she kept her expression neutral, and her voice light and passive even the fear of death truly started to take hold of her, at yet another reminder that battle and control were not merely the games they could so easily feel like, but also the job that she had to perform perfectly. 

“Yes, onee-sama. I know what I deserve.”

Her sister smiled, flexes the fingers of her right hand, and instantly, her body was not hers anymore. Thin, gauzy threads of webbing enveloped her, paralyzed her, and she collapsed to the floor like a sack of potatoes, only able to awkwardly blink her eyes.

The first times this had happened, she had fought, struggled like a cornered animal against the impenetrable bindings. She’d taken so many hits to the face from that damned fan, which she’d done her best to replicate on a shaking but unresisting Nephele’s. But now, it was she who went limp and accepted her fate, not even daring to shut her eyes as Arachne took a handful of the webbing and used it to drag her across the smooth stone, out of the throne room and down a side hallway. 

She pushed open a door at the very end of the hall, and dragged her into a small, dimly lit room that contained only a large cylindrical tank of liquid with a hose attached, and a thick-walled box with a small hole in its side, both made of metal. She could control her expressions and her breathing perfectly well under normal circumstances, but she couldn’t keep her heart from skipping a beat and then speeding up to the point of pain when she saw the too-familiar items. 

“In you go,” Arachne muttered, flipping open the lid of the box with one hand and hefting the teenager into it with the other. “Stay here while I decide whether I feel like letting you out this time.”

With that, she slammed the lid shut and jammed the tank’s hose into the hole in the box, leaving her in complete darkness and silence, stuffed into a space that was just barely big enough to fit her. She knew that it was best to stay calm, but her pulse was pounding harder every second. Part of her insisted that she shouldn’t be panicking, that she should be used to this by now, but who could ever grow used to this? 

In the next moment, the water started to come gushing in through the hose (Arachne turned it on full blast, damn her), and the freezing cold liquid quickly filled the box. As it reaches up to her neck, then her chin, then her lips, though she knew it would do no good she took a deep and desperate breath before it overwhelmed her head completely. 

It was always the same, in the tank. It didn’t matter how long her sister left her in there, alone in the dark, in the water that was not water, the cold that chilled her blood. Hours. Days. Weeks. It would still feel like an eternity that she was floating there, eyes open but unable to see, moving in a body that did not feel like her own. There were still scratches on the opaque glass window on the tank, from where she had managed to break fingernails off in a panicked attempt to escape, when she was still in her early teens. It had taken several times before she stopped doing that.

In here...life left her body. She might as well be dead, for all she could feel. Even taking in breath, though the liquid was breathable, felt painful at worst and alien at best. She could not feel or see or hear. Her body froze, but her mind never did. Eternity. Eternity. Every second like a minute, every minute like an hour, every hour like a day. Even if she could have drawn in the breath to scream, it would have been soundless.

She had longed for her brothers, for her elder sister, for Nephele, at first. But even those times were long past. The rest of the time, the only thought she could muster up in this place was a longing for true death, a quick one, if painful, anything but this cold, dark limbo.

Mother...Mother...

Perhaps that unbidden thought was a longing for death as well. 

But no. Lately, there had been something else, much like that first urge but...different, somehow. It was for...It was...

Her brain was not slowed here, but it was certainly scrambled. She had wondered at points before, outside where she could properly wonder, what would happen if she were to fail badly enough that she needed to be killed for it. The only conclusion she could draw was that she would not be killed, but instead left to spent the rest of her immortality in here.

Will you...Onee-sama....I’m not sorry but I’ll say it for you...Anything, if you’ll just let me come back to life...

Arachne always seemed to know the exact moment that her sister was about to break beyond repair, and Medusa never saw it coming: one moment, she was frozen in the darkness, every survival instinct she had going haywire, and the next, she was falling forward into equally cold air, shivering in her older sister’s arms, the liquid flowing out around their feet.

“There...” Arachne held her close, tight up against her chest, and she could hear the smile in her voice. “All done now. Good girl.”

Revulsion rocked her insides. “H-How...How l-long did you...?”

“Your place is not to ask. Do you have something to tell me?”

She tried to clench her jaw, but could not stop her teeth from chattering. “I...I’m sorry...”

“Hm?”

No. Repentance was not correct. The purpose was punishment and the goal was submission.

“F-Forgive me...Please, onee-sama, I...I failed, and I was wrong...”

Magic words. Arachne laughed lightly. “You are almost forgiven. There’s a small task I’ve decided I want you to complete first. I’ll tell you about it, then you will return to your room now, and the little pet waiting for you there. I’ve given her orders to make things comfortable for you when you get there.”

Medusa almost bristled. Don’t touch her. Don’t give her orders. She’s not yours, she’s mine, she’s mine...!

~0~

She saw nobody running from her as she stalked back across the castle to her room, still shivering and soaking wet. Not this time. Nobody wanted to even get within sight of her, when she was like this. Her hair was a mess, her nerves shot, her fingers twitching and aching for something to squeeze the life out of. She still felt Arachne’s arms around her, the hands on her back, and spent the whole trip back fighting the urge to vomit. 

She entered the room soundlessly. Nephele, sitting at the desk working steadily with a pen and her own little book, did not notice her until she had grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. She jumped badly and started to speak, but was cut off by Medusa’s lips crushing against hers. She whimpered and scraped at the witch’s arms, trying to push her off as she was bent backwards over the desk, knocking books to the floor with several thumps, but her struggles did no good. It was a full minute of twisting and jerking her head while her dress was ripped off, shreds of silk littering the floor, to get her mouth loose enough to speak. 

“W-Wait! Mistress, I — Ow!” Medusa’s teeth were sharp and often left their marks on Nephele’s bottom lip. “P-Please listen!”

Medusa growled low in her throat and did not let go, but stilled for a moment to do so.

“A-Arachne-sama asked me to...”

Nephele pointed through the open door of their bathroom, where there was a bath already drawn.

“For...For you. When she...”

“...How long?”

Nephele was never one to withhold information from her, though Medusa wondered if Arachne had ordered her otherwise, too. “It’s the night of the fifth day.” 

It had felt like fifty years. “Very well then.”

With that, she dragged Nephele by the arm over to the tub and hauled her over the edge into the water, heedless of the small wave that splashed over the side onto her. At least the water was water, and warm this time, too.

She did not bother to remove her own clothes as she climbed into the water on top of Nephele. Washing the liquid residue off of her would come later. She had a deeper thirst to sate now.

Nephele opened her mouth and made a noise as if to say something else, but before she could, Medusa was kneeling on her legs, reaching down to hold her thin shoulders in another vice grip, and shoving her head under the water. 

The girl’s eyes went huge, and she writhed fruitlessly under Medusa’s body. How foolish, Medusa thought, to be afraid. She knew how to kill. Subsequently, she also knew how to abstain from killing. The consequences of allowing her bloodlust to get the better of her had forced her to learn such a thing.

She counted the seconds in her head until Nephele would become unconscious from lack of air, though she was doing a fairly good job holding what little breath had been left in her, wriggling under there. 

One...Two...Three...Four...

When Nephele’s eyes were starting to roll back in her head, Medusa lifted her head up above water, and she sucked in relieved, noisy breaths. “M-Mistress, I -- ”

She dunked her again without a word, pinning her down by the throat. Not enough to choke her, but enough that she still couldn’t pick her head up from the porcelain bottom of the tub. Medusa waited again, counting, as Nephele’s short-nailed scratching at her arms turned quickly from desperate to faint.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Again she hauled her upper body into the air, and again Nephele used her precious seconds of air to beg instead of breathe. “Mistress! Mistress, please, don -- !”

And again into the water, thin tan arms beating against her. Wide, bloodshot violet eyes stared up at her, terrified, from under the water. The heart-shaped face was distorted, quickly losing color with a mouth shut tight, lips twitching.

One. 

“I could let you die here, if I wished.”

Two.

“And you couldn’t do anything to stop me.”

Three.

Nephele’s terror was palpable, and she drank all in in a heady rush, straight to her brain.

Four. 

“Who would miss you, if you died here? Not your mother. Not me.” 

Five.

The thought occurred to her that the words might not be her own. The thought was promptly dismissed. 

Six.

“And what can you do, to stop me? What can you do?” she snarled out. 

Seven. 

Nephele’s struggles slowed, faded, arms dropping into the water with twin splashes as the light dimmed from her eyes. It took Medusa another full second to force her grip to loosen and her arms to heft the girl up into the air and into her arms. 

Now Nephele was the one shivering against her chest, clinging to her as desperately as she had just been trying to hurt her, escape her. Medusa leaned back against the other side of the tub, immersing them both, as she stroked Nephele’s hair. 

“Wh-Why...” the girl whimpered. “Why would you -- ”

“Shh. Because I had to. That’s all. Now, listen. You and I are going to escape from here.”

Nephele startled, froze. “Wh-What?”

“I can’t live like this anymore, Nephele. I can’t. I can’t bring all of my belongings, but I’ll certainly bring you. My sister has given me a task to complete at my discretion, to prove myself worthy of her mercy again. And it is going to give us the opening we need to get away. You said you wanted me to run my plans by you? I have one for you now. No one here pays you any mind except for me, but now that’s going to be to our advantage. Listen closely...”


	7. Chapter Seven

Medusa had very little experience with fire. Well...Very little experience wielding it. But she didn’t expect that it would be so very hard. 

All the castle was deep asleep, as she snuck higher up the tower, flasks of flammable potion in her hands. She and Shaula had learned to be light sleepers, but the elder members of the family had no reason to fear deep sleep. At least, not before tonight.

_Medusa, understand that I love you and all my younger siblings so dearly. I do not take lightly the responsibility to you three that I have been charged with._

The winding stairwell to the one bedroom above her own was far longer than the one that separated her from Shaula’s. A true bird’s nest, she supposed. 

_However, I have an even greater responsibility to Arachnophobia. To the vision we pursue._

All three of their doors had the same lock on them. She had picked Shaula’s enough to have no trouble entering this one. 

_And to that end, I cannot have anyone defy me and walk away unpunished. I cannot, and I will not, be undermined by those who have sworn to obey me._

Her brother’s room was even emptier than her own. It looked like more of a training floor than a bedroom. Nothing much to catch a flame on...But, there was still the carpet. And the wooden bed frame. The cloak, certainly.

_You of all people should understand that my punishments do not come without reason. And I would not ask you to take on this task unless I have reason to place my full trust in you. Can you earn that trust, Medusa?_

Some part of her, thought long buried, was telling her that this was wrong. But the drive for survival, which had ruled her completely these past decades, instead advised her to eliminate the one and only person that could take to the sky after her and Nephele, and drag them back to Arachne. Karasu was still ever-loyal, even if it wasn’t in a way that Arachne could stomach. 

A smirk curved her lips, looking at her brother, fallen deeply asleep in his cloak with the wide black hood over his eyes. She was the one who looked the most like their mother, she knew that for a fact. But still, in cloaked shadow, her true heir could bear more of a resemblance to her than he would ever guess. She had seen that resentment in Arachne’s eyes as well, and wondered why she hadn’t been told to do this sooner. 

Her brother did not move, as she wound a long, flat arrow around his waist and the bed, tightening it there for good measure. But when the snap of the match igniting against her tail startled Karasu from sleep, his expression visible in the small light, she saw no powerful witch, only a blearily confused half-breed. “M-Medusa? What are you doing?”

She was already dropping the match. “Goodbye, nii-chan. We’ve outgrown you.”

The force of the fiery explosion nearly blew her back against the wall, and she summoned a flurry of arrows to shield her from the flames as she fled the room. 

“Medusa! Medusa-a-a-a-a-a!” her brother screeched from behind her, struggling against the arrow pinning him down. Without the ability to move his limbs, he would have been hard-pressed to fight away the fire quickly engulfing the room himself, much less escape. With the potion already slathered onto his clothes and skin, he never had a chance.

It was just like the last time she had heard her family dying in fire, though those memories were blurred. But this time, the noise, the smell, only spurred her faster onward. She would never shut down again, not like she had then. She could no longer afford to.

She ran faster than she ever had in her life, hearing the same noises and smelling traces of the same scents coming from the other floors. Nephele worked fast, fast enough to meet her as they ran out the now-unguarded rear tunnels together and into the forest. Their conversation was rapid and breathless.

“Did you get them all!? Just like his? I gave you enough of the stuff?”

“Yes, the whole lab, every room, Arachne-sama was -- ”

“The notes, I mean, did you -- ”

Nephele reached back to tap the bulging full rucksack strapped to her back. “Yes! Yours, hers, everything!”

“Good!”

“Mistress, where are we even going?!”

“Away from here!” Medusa reached over, grabbed Nephele around the waist, and slung her over her own back. The thin, soft arms immediately wrapping tightly around her sent a soft thrill over her skin. “Anywhere but here!”

Once they found somewhere safe, they’d destroy their collars -- no sense in pretending they were simple necklaces, anymore. It had taken her long enough to admit it. She had no trouble handing Nephele her sword to do the job; she would risk having her head lopped off by an inexperienced girl if it meant being free of her sister’s hold. She would cut her hair, afterward, and dress however she pleased, and no longer have any part of herself restrained by another witch, but that would have to come first.

They couldn’t have destroyed the tracker gems before they left, and if Arachne cared to check her crystal ball she would be enraged to see her prize pet fleeing through the forest instead of helping her. But that was just the thing, wasn’t it, she wouldn’t check it with the fires to deal with, and she only rarely took it to the lab and she had been helping in Giriko’s recovery anyway --

“MEDUSA!” 

That scream of her name made the blood freeze in her veins. 

She turned, and her eyes went huge: it might as well have been a black hurricane hurtling through the trees at them, sparking with magic and rage, instead of her flesh and blood sister. And next to her...

“You little shit!” Giriko roared, charging like a bull at his master’s side. Much of his skin was still dark-mottled and twisted, but his fists, at least, were able to whir like so many saw blades. Both his body and her sister’s dress, she saw now, were badly singed; the heavy odor of burning hung on them too. “This how you fucking repay your sister for everything?!”

“Giriko, kill the half-breed! I will handle my sister!”

Medusa shoved Nephele off her back, slapping the now-long knife on her belt to remind her it was there. “Run! Don’t let him grab you, slash at every soft part you can! He’s still barely strong enough to stand, you’ll be faster!”

“Yeah, you fucking little mutt girl, take that bet, see what I do to you!” 

Giriko and Nephele both crashed into the brush ahead, while Medusa just barely summoned a wall of arrows in time to shield herself from the blast of black lightning that Arachne fired at her. The clash of magic on magic was explosive, and shook the forest floor.

“How dare you, girl!” Arachne’s face was contorted in rage, her eyes glowing bright silver-on-blue: just the way their father’s always had when the beast within him was released, when he was about to rip something apart. “I trusted you, I cared for you, I raised you, and you spit in my face like this?!” 

And just like that, the fire was raging in Medusa’s heart as well. As if responding to the very beats of her soul, her magic and instincts moved her. They launched her on Vector Plates from tree to tree around her furious sister as burning dark magic -- wind, lightning, a pale form of energy, but never the pure black potency of real shadow -- blew those trees to pieces around her. 

“I should have left you all to die! I should have thrown you to the wolves and ran for my own life! Instead I devoted that life to you, a weak little brat like you!”

The ground itself was cracking under the force of her rage. Medusa glanced around frantically for an opening to attack instead of dodge, endlessly dodge, but there was none that she could see. Still, there were other ways she could attack.

“You aren’t my mother! You will never be my mother!” she yelled, with far more bubbling fury than even she had thought her voice capable of. 

Arachne let out a wordless cry of outrage, and thrust out her hand. A veritable cannonball of magic shot through the air, screeching and sparking, and caught Medusa in the chest, knocking her out of the air mid-Plate jump. She fell hard to the ground, and could not rise from there, all the breath flown from her. She lay on her stomach, choking and coughing and scrabbling at the dirt to try and get up again, as Arachne stalked towards her. 

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child,” the older witch snarled, baring her teeth and drawing a long, cruelly curved blade from her dress. “You don’t deserve to die by magic. You deserve to be cut to pieces like the treacherous snake you are. What did you think you were going to do without me, anyway?”

Get up, she ordered herself, get up...Through vision knocked shaky, she could see her sister getting closer, closer, on top of her now, raising the blade...

All at once, she remembered being a child. She remembered the blade of the witch hunter. She remembered her mother, the black sword --

She was surging upward like a river through a broken dam.

“I am going to LIVE!”

The sound of the Vector Blade plunging into Arachne’s stomach and slicing through her torso was the sweetest Medusa had ever heard, second only to the strangled, squelching cry of shock and pain that Arachne let out at it. 

In a split second their positions were reversed -- Arachne lying, twitching, on the ground and Medusa with blade in hand -- but Medusa took no time to savor the moment. Centuries later, she would be kicking herself for not at least trying to confirm the kill then and there, but right that second the only thing she could think about was putting as much distance between her and her sister as possible. So she spun on her bare heel and fled, leaving her sister bleeding out into the dirt, too weak even to scream after her.

It was not long before she passed the lesser source of chaos here: Nephele, a little white and tan blur in the brush, did not seem to have landed so much as a scratch with her knife, but was doing a fine job of ducking, dodging, and parrying Giriko’s wildly flying fists and kicks. Giriko, for his part, was red in the face, sweating buckets, and bellowing with rage. 

Medusa darted past and shouted, “Nephele! To me! We’re leaving!”, and Giriko let out a particularly loud noise and began to give chase as Nephele obeyed.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going, brat?! We’re not finished here!”

Medusa turned to him with an ear-to-ear grin. “Oh, yes we are, aniki. Chase and kill us if you like, and then go back home to your dead master!”

Giriko’s eyes widened. “No...No fucking way, you didn’t -- !”

“Maybe if nee-san had been the one fighting all these years, and I the one lounging uselessly on a throne, the outcome would be different, no? But, it was as she wanted it. She’ll want to say goodbye to you before she passes, I’m sure!”

Giriko skidded to a stop, several muscles in his face twitching, before he wrenched himself around and started to run back to save Arachne.

“This isn’t over!” he thundered over his shoulder. “Not between us! I’ll never let her die! One day we’ll kill you both for this! We’ll fucking kill you!” 

“Such a way with words,” Nephele muttered as they disappeared from his sight, and Medusa was surprised to find herself snickering. 

“They can both scream until they’re blue in the face. With Karasu gone, no more healing, so even if she does survive, by the time she recovers enough to check for us again, we’ll have these damned things in pieces,” Medusa said, scratching one last time at her collar. 

“I know it’s not likely that you came up with an idea between the last time I asked you and now,” Nephele began, “but where do we go from here?”

Medusa looked up ahead. They still had a ways to go from here, but she could see the end of the forest, the slivers of light past the swamps and the trees and the darkness. The entire rest of the world was past this place.

“Anywhere, my angel. Anywhere. We will be free.”

Nephele smiled, eyes shining with genuine happiness, though they both knew in their hearts that that would not last. “I would like that, mistress.”

“No hierarchy to respect anymore, Nephele. From now on, you will call me by my name.”

“Very well, then...Medusa.”

Medusa-sama might have been a better response. But she was too busy shivering with delight to care. 

“History might remember the name Arachne Gorgon, I’ll let that come to pass. But it will not be her who tears the world of Death to shreds. No...It will be me.”


	8. Chapter 8

Like the scorpions that she had been named for and empowered by, Shaula eventually found herself hiding under a rock in the desert. 

Even after eight hundred years, Shaula didn’t know many other witches. Any of them, really. But she was fairly certain that other witches wouldn’t be anywhere near brave enough to hide out less than a hundred miles from Death City. She had heard that there were meisters with Soul Perception coming out of Shibusen now, but she felt confident that she was out of range of any of them even without Soul Protect. Her underground home and laboratory were nowhere near as glamorous as the castle she had spent her childhood in, but they were far superior to the various hideaways she had bounced between in the time between then and now.

She felt certain that she was better off than her eldest siblings; living was far better than dead, like Arachne and poor Karasu, and from her few passings-through of the Czech region, she knew that Giriko had wound up with no life at all, still stubbornly holding a candle for his destroyed master to return one day. Shaula fervently wished that such a hope was entirely unfounded, half because she did not want to hear the “I told you so, runt” that would come with her insufferable brother’s being proven right, and half because she did not want there to be any chance of her becoming trapped under her oldest sister’s thumb ever again. To Arachne, Shaula was an insignificant possession, but not quite so much that she wouldn’t move to recover her as soon as possible. The second she even thought she felt the oppressive reverberations of Arachne’s soul returning to the world, she planned to go even further underground, as far down and out of reach as possible.

That only left Medusa. Shaula’s relationship with her middle sister had improved phenomenally since they had grown up: they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in centuries. She didn’t even know where Medusa was living now, which may not in fact have been ideal — if there was a venomous snake in the room, then it would probably be safer to know where the damn thing was — but was still perfectly fine with her. Even without seeing her, Shaula was still certain of one thing: her sister was still hiding herself away and devoting immortal life to her research. Whatever its subject was, Shaula knew both that she would not like it, and that she could not allow it to surpass her own experiments.

Only dimly was she aware of the muffled shouts and pleas from the two humans bound and gagged behind her. Her hair had long since reached its full potential, and she had used its stinging barb to paralyze her latest test subjects, after catching them alone and stalking them through the desert. She neither knew nor cared what they were doing out here all alone. All that mattered was that they had had the significantly poor luck to stumble too close to the scorpion’s den.

Shaula rummaged briefly through a desk drawer for her handheld tape recorder. “Subjects T31 and T32 restrained in testing room two, systems clear of all outlying drugs. T31 is a human female, thirty-six years of age, height sixty-five inches, weight one hundred twenty-nine pounds. T32 is a human female, nine years of age, height fifty point five inches, weight fifty-nine pounds. T32 is the offspring of T31. Subjects will undergo procedure fourteen regarding the overriding of primal instinct.”

She turned around. T31’s eyes had gone wide at her words, but T32 didn’t seem to have been paying attention, eyes still streaming tears and fixed on her mother. She didn’t know whether the sounds coming from underneath their gags were attempts at words or just panicked screaming. “T31 will be injected with one medium dose of Traitor Venom.”

T31’s yowl at the sight of her barb raising, glowing, was abruptly cut off when Shaula jammed the tip of it into her neck. Her body went slack, and her eyes shifted from dark brown to bright red and blue, spreading as wide as they would go. Shaula smirked.

“T31 is now being freed from her restraints.”

With a snap of her fingers and one red spark, the ropes binding T31 were broken, and she staggered to her feet. Shaula stepped back into the shadowy corner of the room, a smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“T31 will receive its action command.”

She lowered the tape recorder to her side, and raised her voice slightly so that T31 could hear her. The first few subjects had turned their rage and newfound strength on her instead, which was simply not acceptable. But, with some new adjustments to the formula...

“Kill.”

T31 lurched as if struck. She staggered again for a few long moments, twitching in every limb as if being shocked. Then, just as Shaula was beginning to think it might be another lost cause, she let out one last screech into her gag and charged like a mad bull at T32, still hogtied on the floor. 

Shaula kept her thumb on the tape recorder button, her smirk broadening as it picked up the sounds from across the tiny, high-ceilinged room: the tearing of hair and spatter of blood, the smashing of skull against solid stone floor, the screams and screams and screams. 

It was less than a minute before it was over, but closing in on two before T31 stopped ravaging what was now the unrecognizable corpse of T32. Shaula snickered: how easily the endlessly glorified love of a mother could be made to crumble with only the slightest disruption of the system. It was clear to her that her own by blood had been only a very rare exception, and all the others in all the world were merely cheap attempts at imitation, Arachne included.

“T32 is deceased. T31 seems not to realize.”

But, perhaps too soon: a sliver of lucidity was seeming to slide its way back into T31’s mind. She froze over the body, wide-eyed tears slowly sliding down her cheeks. Then she spun around, irises still glowing, spittle flying from her mouth, and ran at Shaula with broken and blood-caked fingernails extended towards the witch’s throat. Before she could even get close, Shaula speared the human’s throat almost carelessly with her hair barb. 

“T31 regained slight awareness of self and attempted to turn on me, similar to subject T29 post-injection of low dose, and has been disposed of. Formula must be adjusted in strength targeting the complete shutdown of both personality and protective instinct. Addition of elements to heighten suggestibility recommended also. Experiment concluded.”

She clicked off the tape recorder, and slid it into her dress pocket. She could not afford to be impatient, she often reminded herself. All these small steps would get her to the end of her journey eventually. And there she would stand upon the ruins of Shibusen, the cloak of a dead god drawn around her shoulders, lifted to heights of which no other witch dared imagine. This time it would be Medusa who fled in terror from her, and if Arachne ever showed her face in the world of the living again it would be she who bowed to Shaula. All would see, that she was the most superior of the Gorgons. 

Her fingertips drifted across her chest, and found in the folds of her scarf and dress the little silver raven, on its string around her neck. Against her better judgment -- she was a grown adult, after all, and should have no further need of childish comforts -- she closed her hand around it and gripped it tight, letting the little beak dig painfully into her palm. 

Perhaps there had been another, once, more worthy of inheriting the Gorgon legacy, though he was not of their blood. But that was a time dead and gone, in a surge of great golden fire and black feathers. She could not avenge her parents, or her brother, or repair the weakness and foolish mistakes of her childhood. The last thing left to her was the chance to prove that she was Minerva Gorgon’s only true heir.

“For you, my mother,” she whispered, lifting the warm metal to her lips. “And against the two of them.”

~0~

While her adolescence had crawled by, torturously slow, at some point as a adult Medusa had come to the realization that there was simply not enough time in the day. Or night. Or anything else, to do everything that had to be done. She had avoided sleep in favor of study, when she was young, but now she genuinely abhorred it.

(Especially now that there was no warm body in the sheets next to her, to lure her in. She had far superior heat lamps in this day and age, but though comforting, they just didn’t compare.)

The manipulation of souls hadn’t been enough, and she had exhausted the possibilities of what could be done with her older sister’s research notes in only a few decades. Instead, the study of the nebulous force of madness had attracted her attention, and before she knew it, it had become her entire life. 

(“Medusa-sama, no,” Nephele pleaded, unusually talkative, grabbing her wrist. “It’s not safe for you, this is not something you should be experimenting in!”

Medusa’s hands were well-practiced by this point, and she jerked her arm out of Nephele’s weak grip and swung it back to cleanly backhand the other woman’s face in two swift movements. “Your thoughts are unimportant here. Your job is to assist me, not anchor me.”)

The half-breed, funnily enough, had only been half right. But that too was unimportant. Medusa had had to train herself rigidly never to dwell on the past.

Given the choice, she would quite gladly take the tedious annoyance of the here and now over the impending pressure explosion that had been her adolescence.

“Why do you hesitate, Crona?”

The little thing turned its head from the idle rabbit and stared up at her, distraught face streaming with tears. “M-Medusa-sama...I, I can’t d-do it!”

She resisted the urge to sigh. Where did her child’s truly astounding capacity for whining and cowardice come from? Surely not from her, nor from their sire. She would have half a mind to blame their being born in a far softer world than their mother had grown up in, if she hadn’t kept Crona confined to the castle since birth.

“Yes, you can,” she told them, in a tone more cold than at all encouraging. “And you will.”

Sniffling and sobbing was all the response she received. Ragnarok hung limply in Crona’s grip, looking very out of place in that tiny, soft hand. But that was all right; one day Crona would wield his blood as easily as breathing. She had grown into her magic, her swordplay, the same way. It would be nice if Crona had inherited some magic to grow into himself, as well, but sadly it appeared that fate had dealt her an exceptionally poor hand with this one.

“Don’t look at me, Crona. Look at it. Look at its throat. Never swing blind if you can help it, always keep your eyes on your target.”

More crying, but Crona did turn their eyes back to their intended kill. Tension held every muscle in their body taut. 

She would not touch them, would not jab them forward. Starvation and dehydration would be the only physical torture used to motivate them, but she would wait for either too much time to pass before blood was drawn or for Crona to protest again to drag them to their containment room. It certainly wasn’t a moral choice: Crona was simply afraid to kill, to have a living thing writhing under their blade. (Remembering blurrily her own first forays into the bringing of death, Medusa had presented them with dead things to play with instead, but they wouldn’t touch those either.) But fear was a feeble opponent, easily crushed, and the deterioration of the still-plastic mind until the instinct to survive above all else won out was the quickest and simplest way to combat it.

“Lift your sword, Crona. Do it fast, right in the throat. Then you can eat.”

Their grip tightened, though whether it was to prepare to pounce or to keep Ragnarok from dropping out of their sweaty palms was anybody’s guess. 

It was easier to crush fear, Medusa had found, than to harden a heart already softened to uselessness. Her own had been naturally steely, and had merely needed some galvanizing. She resisted the urge to smirk: she’d thank her dear brother for the lesson by slicing his face open one day. Two siblings down already, two to go. And, more disappointingly, one lover...

A soft heart. If Nephele had still been alive now, she would have been not only a perfect lab assistant but also a perfect tool on which to shove off the more domestic aspects of raising Crona. She would doted on the tiny little thing, with her strange fondness for all that was weak and helpless, from the moment it left Medusa’s body. She might also have been useful in helping Crona discern which things were meant to be killed and which were not. It was an amusing fantasy she indulged in at times: holding Nephele close, putting a knife to her throat, and informing Crona, Either the rabbit dies or Mommy does. But even that Nephele had managed to ruin, with her own foolishness. 

It had been so fast. A routine test of the black blood’s volatility, one misplaced drop, a gaseous hiss and an explosion...And before she’d even had enough time to be shocked, let alone jump out of the way, something thin and bony had collided with her, knocking her back and taking all the force onto itself...Herself...

Then all of a sudden there had been a broken body in her arms and blood spattering every inch of her. She had been...shocked, was the only word to describe it. For once, she hadn’t known what to do, and without her thought, she had reached out to stroke the face of the dying woman. And she had summoned the last of her strength to smack it away.

(“A-All this time...” she had managed, choking and coughing and spitting up blood. “Wh-Why...did, d-did you have to b-be the one...t-to take my hand...? Th-That day. All...All the w-women in the world, and I...Y-You...”)

She had conveniently gone limp and died before Medusa could react to having such uncharacteristic disloyalty spat in her face, but even so many decades later she wasn’t exactly sure what she would have said, to her companion of centuries. How long, she wondered, had Nephele been waiting to say that and get away with it? Well, no matter. Nephele had been the closest bond she had ever had, but she would tie Crona to her much more securely.

“Go on, Crona,” she prodded, adopting a silkier, more soothing tone. “It won’t feel bad. It will be quick if you let it. And then we’ll eat.”

The repetition of that last point, she had found, was quite effective. 

Crona whimpered, gripped Ragnarok so tightly that their already-pale knuckles turned white as bone, and then they charged forward with a cry. Technically, her order had been to cut the rabbit’s throat. But watching her child swing the sword in such a panicked frenzy that the fuzzy little head flew clean across the room, she supposed that she could overlook it, she thought with a smirk. 

“Very good, Crona. That’s very good.” 

Crona was bent over as if retching, but there was nothing in their stomach with which to do that. They were panting and sweating, trembling from head to foot. They flinched when Medusa laid a cool hand flat between their shoulder blades, but made another small whimper of relief when she started scratching gently at the base of their neck, at their hair. Touch, to her, had been perverted into something repulsive mere years into Arachne’s dominion, but though Crona too feared it, they craved it as well. They were positively starved for it. And like every need and comfort that they were starved for, they would only ever get it from Medusa. She would allow them no Nephele of their own; the only release for their despair and desperation, whatever anger they were able to muster, would come in following Medusa’s orders. 

“Go get washed up and go sit in the kitchen,” she told them softly. “Soon I’ll come and make dinner. You’ve done well, you’ve earned it.”

Crona fled as if from a wild beast, and the tinny noise of Ragnarok berating them for being too slow and such a coward echoed down the hall until they disappeared. Medusa smirked, picking up the body of the rabbit in one hand and the head in the other. She was not a talented cook, but she was certainly not a wasteful one; every part of the animal possible would be going in tonight’s stew. Whatever was in their bowl, Crona would wolf every bit of it down, every time.

She allowed herself a measure of pride, regarding the careful molding of her child. It was said that experience was the best teacher, but nobody ever mentioned that it need not be her experience at all. She had had more than enough time to catalogue the myriad mistakes that Arachne had made, in raising and training her, and plenty too to plan strategies to avoid them all. Everything her sister had done wrong, she would do right. And Arachne had done oh so many things wrong, it was almost funny, in hindsight.

“Wonderful job, nee-san,” she murmured, smirking again. “I think of you every time I crush a spider, you know. They put up more of a fight than you ever did.”

She had been a failure, a liability, a poorly tamed beast that had bit the hand that fed. And indirectly, she had led to the eventual downfall of her master, in breaking her leash and fleeing into the rain. Her own child would never do such a thing. Crona would grow up loyal, they would grow up perfect. And if they ever were to put a blade through her, it would certainly be by her own design. 

In a way, she would be a better mother than Arachne had ever been, even for all her grandiose claims. And the thought made her want to throw back her head and laugh in pure triumph.

~0~

Arachne had fallen to pieces.

It had taken her only a surprisingly short time to adjust to her new form. She had forever used the countless spiders of the world to do her bidding, so dividing her soul, her life, among all of them felt purely natural. It was strange to exist in so many little moving pieces, true, but it was good, she decided.

From here, she could go anywhere and see anything that she chose. She could know everything. 

There was nowhere she feared to venture; if one of her tiny vessels was crushed, it would be quickly replaced by another one and would take nothing at all away from her. No one was ever exactly excited to see her, but no one ever suspected anything untoward from her presence either. She did not know what might possibly restore her to a physical body, but she would find it someday. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to stop her, anymore.

A considerable amount of her time was spent checking in on the dormant Arachnophobia. Mosquito, even as he shriveled with age, was still managing the upkeep and affairs of the castle. While she still lived, her hypnosis magic remained, holding her forces still under her sway and tying them to the castle, to continue her work and await her return. Giriko had returned to the village that had long forgotten him to wait out his vigil, perfecting both his engineering and his body-hopping magic over all of his new lifetimes. He plastered a smile onto his face when he was around other people, a smile that did not suit him in the slightest. But when he was alone, or around his children, his face was locked into a permanent scowl. He was unsatisfied, cold, only barely holding back his urge to return to the one life that had ever suited him. 

Calm yourself, my dear, she wished she could tell him. Giriko never crushed a spider, no matter how big or where on his body they crawled: he knew somehow where she was. He believed wholeheartedly in her return to him. Your loyalty is not misplaced. I will find a way back to you. 

It was comforting to stay near them, but not at all interesting. What did interest her, on the other hand, were her younger siblings. From the way they would viciously kill any spider they saw, her or not, she figured that they either suspected what she had done, or that their resentment of her had held strong for all these centuries. 

Shaula, free of the weight on her shoulders, was going full steam ahead in trying to prove herself the superior child. How she intended to do that as a forgotten little nothing from the shadows, Arachne did not know, but it made her wish very much that she could laugh. Sometimes she saw something on a passing young man — a cheek twisted by fire, glossy dark hair falling over shoulders, perhaps a glimpse of violet shadow-flame — that reminded her of her younger brother, still struggling in the land of the living...But it could not be Karasu, surely not. Half-breeds were not such hardy things as to survive an attack by full-blooded witches. Perhaps it was merely a trace of guilt; having one’s lifelong companion slaughtered might be enough to stir such a thing in her.

And Medusa...

Limited creature though the spiders might be, her feelings were not the slightest bit numbed: her outrage and hatred over the little brat’s betrayal of her still burned just as fiercely as ever. Nothing had ever in her life made her more furious than slipping into wherever the snake had made her nest, and seeing her surging forward in her research and experiments without the slightest trace of gratitude for the jumpstart her sister had given her. The death of poor little Nephele had almost made her laugh -- dear thing, she had truly never been meant for a happy ending -- but whatever grief Medusa might have experienced manifested only in numbness and a now undivided devotion to her work, and there was no sweet taste to the girl’s pain at all. 

And it had only gotten worse from there. She hadn’t bonded in the least with that strange young man she’d shared a few brief trysts with, which Arachne had found odd; Medusa had never shown interest in such casual things, only in deep control. But less than a year later, seeing the girl’s stomach swell, Arachne understood, and jealousy brought her rage into a soaring crescendo. 

She knew perfectly well that Medusa saw her offspring as nothing more than an oversized lab rat, but it did not make it any easier for Arachne to see the newborn cradled in her sister’s arms instead of her own. That empty girl was no mother, not one little bit. How dare Medusa make a mockery of everything she had set out to be — !

Though, she had to admit, training the child from birth to be a brutal and unquestioning soldier was a more effective method than picking up already-tainted children from another. Much as she did not want to, she found some fascination in watching her training the little half-breed in as many methods of killing as could be performed without magic. Quite a cute little picture book she’d drawn for the purpose, too. Perhaps when she returned to true life, she would take her young nephew under her own wing instead. The fear-borne loyalty that Medusa was cultivating in the child was near-impossible to break, true...But transferring it to a different, stronger master, one who had saved the poor soul from starvation and pain, was another story entirely. 

But, of course, such a consolation prize would only be won after she finally hunted down and broke her treacherous little sister. It had been quite a long time since she had indulged in mythology, even when she had been alive, but that was how her story was meant to end, was it not? Arachne the young maiden had lost her human body, but she had still been victorious in her bout with gods and enemies alike. She had still surpassed arrogant Minerva. 

And it would be so, her victory far more triumphant than pyrrhic. 

I will return to my own body, to power, she thought, the voice of the legion shuddering through her countless bodies. _I will see my sisters defeated and squirming at my feet, never to rise again. I will hear them begging me for my forgiveness, for my love once again. They won’t be the only ones so desperate for it. I will blanket this world in fear and madness...And I will stand above it as mother of all._


End file.
